Libertarian health wonk Michael Cannon writes that "it should come as no surprise that health insurance premiums have risen 87% since 2000. Doctors and insurance companies can get away with charging high prices because their customers don't bear the costs directly...This isn't some inevitable result of market forces, but of government programs and tax preferences for employer-controlled insurance."
But then you'd assumedly expect the individual insurance market -- where employers have no role, government programs aren't involved, and thus both distortions are minimized -- to exhibit much healthier characteristics. Instead, it's far more perverse.
Between 8 and 18 percent of applicants are denied health coverage outright due to preexisting conditions. Additionally, the pool of individuals seeking coverage is quite healthy -- the opposite of what you'd expect, given that the sick are disproportionately likely to be unemployed, and are more acutely in need of care. They're simply being priced out. Meanwhile, individual coverage is becoming less and less popular -- and that's across-the-board, the rich and the poor, the old and the young, the sick and the healthy. Why? Well, it turns out their premiums are going up too -- even without the distortions of employers or governments.
My guess is Cannon will say that this proves consumers still don't have enough power, and they should just be paying for their care directly. But the world of individual insurance is still much closer to his perfect world than, say, Medicare, is, and yet it's a comparative dystopia, in which substantial fractions of the population simply can't get insurance, costs continue going up, and more and more individuals are giving up on coverage altogether.
