Thursday, November 20, 2008

Health Care Reform on the Horizon?

It seems that everyone is beginning to prepare themselves for Obama's proposed health care reforms. The American Health Insurance Plans and the Blue Cross and Blue Shield Association have agreed to support Obama's plan as long as he imposes individual mandates for health insurance. The insurers claim that if mandates are not in place, people will wait until they are ill to purchase insurance, damaging the risk pool and driving up premium prices for everyone.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/20/us/20health.html?ref=health

When we visited the Blue Shield headquarters a few weeks ago, Tom Epstein, their VP of Public Affairs, talked about Blue Shield's lobbying efforts in this arena. They have a PAC that contributes money to candidates and lobbies both on the federal and state level.

Not only are these new developments fascinating, but I think its fun that thing we learn in class actually happen in real life.

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