Los Angeles Times:
• “Lawmakers are expected to pass a bill this week that would repeal the federal antitrust exemption that insurance companies have enjoyed since 1945 — a move that makes for little more than a good sound bite.” (Los Angeles Times, Back to the drawing board, 02/08/2010)
• “Removing the exemption won’t do much to boost competition or spark a price war among insurers, however. (The Congressional Budget Office said that a similar proposal in the House’s comprehensive healthcare bill would have no significant effect on premiums because state regulators already require insurers to price their coverage competitively.)” (Los Angeles Times, Back to the drawing board, 02/08/2010)
McClatchy:
• However, the effort to remove the 65-year-old exemption is a small step that’s unlikely to have much direct impact on consumers, according to independent analysts. ‘I don’t think this will have much effect. This is strictly political posturing,’ said Paul Ginsburg, the president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, a Washington research group.” (McClatchy, Analysts: Stripping health insurers’ antitrust protection won’t affect consumers much, 02/07/2010)
• “But rising costs, he said, stem from money passing through insurance companies to health care providers such as doctors and hospitals, and therefore ‘passing something focused on insurers like this is not going to do a lot. It’s not the reform that’s really needed.’” (McClatchy, Analysts: Stripping health insurers’ antitrust protection won’t affect consumers much, 02/07/2010)
• “In fact, Ginsburg said, insurers already are prohibited from colluding to raise prices and from merging at will. They can, however, pool information about risks, and it can be argued that that helps them manage ways of controlling costs and even rates.” (McClatchy, Analysts: Stripping health insurers’ antitrust protection won’t affect consumers much, 02/07/2010)
Kaiser Health News:
• “…many antitrust experts say that ending the exemption — by repealing the 1945 McCarran-Ferguson Act — wouldn’t significantly increase competition or reduce premiums.” (Kaiser Health News, The Antitrust Exemption For Health Insurers: Meaningful Or Not?, 02/08/2010)
• “‘This is just barking up the wrong tree for health insurance,’ said Scott Harrington, a professor of health care management at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. While many lawmakers are eager to pass some kind of health care bill, they ‘don’t have a clue how the antitrust exemption works. It might sound good, but I can think of very few things in the bill that would be less consequential for consumers of health insurance.’” (Kaiser Health News, The Antitrust Exemption For Health Insurers: Meaningful Or Not?, 02/08/2010)
• “An analysis by the Congressional Budget Office estimated that repealing the antitrust exemption for health insurers ‘would have no significant effects on either the federal budget or the premiums that private insurers charged for health insurance.’” (Kaiser Health News, The Antitrust Exemption For Health Insurers: Meaningful Or Not?, 02/08/2010)
National Public Radio:
• “…other analysts, including both the Congressional Budget Office and the Congressional Research Service, say they doubt that eliminating the antitrust exemption will have much of an impact on competition or premiums.” (National Public Radio, Bill Would Apply Antitrust Laws To Insurance, 02/08/2010)
• “In fact, says Kevin Bingham of the American Academy of Actuaries, ‘quite honestly, it would lead to what I believe and what the academy believes would be reduced competition, and potentially higher rates.’ Bingham says that’s because what the exemption was meant for in the first place was to allow insurance companies to share data about insurance risk. That’s important, because without that data, insurance companies could end up setting premiums too low. Then the insurance companies could become insolvent, and unable to pay claims. Large insurers — the ones Democrats say are taking over the health insurance markets — probably wouldn’t even be affected by the repeal, says Bingham, because they collect data themselves. But the effect could actually be negative on smaller or start-up companies, he says, ‘and without that ability to look at that industry data and kind of looking at cost estimates, it might push them away from getting involved at all.’ And if small companies stay on the sidelines, competition could actually be reduced.” (National Public Radio, Bill Would Apply Antitrust Laws To Insurance, 02/08/2010)
Congressional Quarterly:
• “…bill supporters have little evidence to support claims that the antitrust exemption leads to higher costs. In fact, their statements in support of the bill sometimes suggest the opposite.” (CQ, House Democrats Push Bill to Eliminate Insurance Antitrust Exemption, 02/05/2010)
• “Yet there are indications that requiring insurers to comply with federal antitrust law in addition to state regulations could actually decrease competition in the industry.” (CQ, House Democrats Push Bill to Eliminate Insurance Antitrust Exemption, 02/05/2010)
• The Congressional Research Service (CRS) noted in a Jan. 14 report that smaller insurance companies rely on data collected from their larger competitors and shared industrywide — something that would be forbidden under the Democratic bill — in order to accurately set their rates. ‘Should additional data be unavailable to small insurers in some way, further consolidation in the insurance industry as small insurers merge in order to gain the competitive advantage of additional information is a likely, albeit, ironic, possibility,’ CRS said.” (CQ, House Democrats Push Bill to Eliminate Insurance Antitrust Exemption, 02/05/2010)
• “State insurance commissioners say that they already sufficiently regulate health insurers and are opposed to the Perriello-Markey legislation and to similar proposals.” (CQ, House Democrats Push Bill to Eliminate Insurance Antitrust Exemption, 02/05/2010)
Ezra Klein:
• “The policy takeaway is that the CBO estimates that repeal will have no measurable impact on premiums or coverage…” (The Washington Post, Ezra Klein, A primer on the antitrust exemption for insurers, 02/08/2010)
• “On the other hand, since it doesn’t matter much, and it’s good politics either way, Democrats may as well go after it. They just shouldn’t fool themselves into thinking they’ve actually done anything useful when they’ve finished.” (The Washington Post, Ezra Klein, A primer on the antitrust exemption for insurers, 02/08/2010)
