Quotes About Insurers

Medicare is immune from the competitive pressures that force private insurers to pay attention to what patients and doctors want.

In general, insurers say criticisms of claims-handling are unfair because most policyholders are paid promptly, and some denials are necessary to root out fraud.

Get more competition into the New Hampshire marketplace, and then we'll find that there will be insurers that will compete on convenience as compared to cost.

What makes the encumbrance of reimbursement even more distortive and binding is that most prices insurers pay are not set by market forces. Rather, they are administered prices that reek of the pricing algorithms and backroom negotiations used in communist systems. Those

Economists specialize in pointing out unpleasant trade-offs - a skill that is on full display in the health care debate. We want patients to receive the best care available. We also want consumers to pay less. And we don't want to bankrupt the government or private insurers. Something must give.

We right now give $15 billion every year as subsidies to private insurers under the Medicare system. Doesn't work any better through the private insurers. They just skim off $15 billion.

Competition among insurers would bring down the cost of health care insurance, just as it brings down the cost of car or homeowners insurance.

Freedom solutions - cross-state insurers; health cooperatives.

In wrestling with this dilemma, many countries are loosening government controls and injecting market mechanisms, particularly cost sharing by patients, market pricing of goods and services, and increased competition among insurers and providers. As Pat Cox, former president of the European Parliament, put it in a report to the European Commission, "We should start to explore the power of the market as a way of achieving much better value for money."339

This is a government takeover of our healthcare system. It is the government basically running the entire healthcare system, turning large insurers into de facto public utilities, depriving people of choice, depriving people of options, raising people's prices, raising taxes when we need new jobs.