Health Insurance Reforms : Unintended Consequences

With comprehensive health reform stalled, there is growing pressure to enact more modest health insurance reforms. These efforts have an understandable practical and political appeal. Denials of coverage, cancellations of policies, preexisting condition exclusions, lifetime caps on benefits, and other practices have the effect of denying coverage to many individuals who need health insurance. Legislation prohibiting these practices is a seemingly easy way to fix obvious injustices without tackling the entire range of contentious issues. Unfortunately, enacting “health insurance reform” is likely to lead to severe unintended consequences