The Cavalcade Of Risk is up at The Sentinel Effect. Joe Paduda has an interesting article over at Managed Care Matters about individual health plans and the free market for health insurance. Be sure to check out the comments too, as the points in the article are expanded there. I agree with Joe in that counting on the existing individual health insurance market to solve our health insurance problems is probably not going to work. They’re in business to make a profit – but so are group health insurance carriers. Everyone needs health insurance, except maybe Warren Buffet. I’ve never had any medical issues at all, but I sure as heck need health insurance. Tomorrow might be the day I trip over a sidewalk crack and break my neck, or find a lump where there’s not supposed to be one. Individual health insurance guards against possible future risk, rather than known current risk. The trade off is that it’s a lot less expensive than guaranteed issue policies. It’s true that in all but five states, you have to be relatively healthy in order to qualify for individual health insurance. But the sad fact is that if we lived in one of the five states where all health insurance is guaranteed issue, my family would struggle to be able to afford coverage. (In Colorado, individual health insurance is underwritten, although we do have Cover Colorado for people who don’t qualify for private health insurance). Overall, I’m with Joe on this one – McCain’s plan calls for too much of a focus on making profits for the health insurance industry, and not enough focus on securing real access to health care for all Americans.

The Colorado Health Insurance Insider has a post in the Cavalcade this week – my take on Obama’s health plan, which isn’t perfect either – but as far as I can tell, it’s better than McCain’s

JC at Amateur Economists has a post about pharma and medical supply industry sponsorship in the medical community. His take on it is a little more forgiving than mine, but he makes a good suggestion that industry money be put into a pool that can be used by medical schools without specific knowledge of where the money originated.