Why the Insurance Industry is Good for America

BNET has posted a piece summarizing research from the Dartmouth Institute showing that "among states with the top 10 insurance market concentrations, all but Rhode Island showed lower than national average levels of Medicare spending per enrollee in 2006. In seven of the 10 states, spending was at least 10 percent lower than the national average." Counter to other research (and, in a way, common sense), it seems that lack of insurance industry competition does not necessarily drive prices up. This certainly runs counter to my post below. See the full article here. So the question remains: will weakening or strengthening the insurance industry help reduce health care inflation? If a public option prevails in the current reform debate, there's pretty good evidence that the industry will be weakened... so, we'll see soon enough.