Taking All Comers

Suderman thinks that health care reform will drive up insurance premiums:

In 1996, Massachusetts passed an earlier set of reformscommunity rating and guaranteed issuethat required insurers to take all comers, and to sell plans to individuals at the same price, regardless of their individual health status.

For pretty obvious reasons, those sorts of reforms drive up premium prices tremendously. In New York, for example, similar reforms have driven up individual insurance premiums enough that the Manhattan Institute estimates that premium prices would drop 42 percent if they were repealed. And going back to AHIP's reports, sure enough, New York and Massachusetts are the states with the two most expensive individual market premiums.