A cheaper health-care option would be to take the sick out behind a barn and put them out of their misery, which is why we don't turn health care into a linear optimization problem.
It is impossible to have the increased preventative care come before patients' access to that care, just as it's impossible to detect illness when a patient cannot even be seen due to lack of insurance.
That was the reason I said I didn't expect a reduction in price in the short-term, because it simply doesn't make sense. That doesn't mean costs won't eventually go down compared to what they would have been if PPACA didn't go into effect, but that's getting beyond my ability to predict based just on simple principles.
To Save Money, Save the Health Care Act (Peter Orzag) http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/opinion/04orszag.html?_r=3...;
Health insurance in MA is not equivalent to health insurance in Idaho; in MA insurance is much more tightly regulated so that you can rely on it. What good is a largely unregulated insurance policy that refuses to pay out when you're really sick?
Now, if Idaho had strong regulators that were enforcing the same sort of standards as MA, you might be able to compare but then you'd run smack into the fact that...the cost structures are completely different. Everything is more expensive in MA, including housing and doctors.
Off the top of my head, it seems like mean premium prices is going to depend on a lot of different factors, ranging from demographics (younger folks make up a larger fraction of the population in TX than in MA) to cost of living.
I think your whole analysis fails because you're missing half of the Cost Benefit Analysis. You're looking only at costs, without assessing benefits. One might as well look at Somalia and proclaim how awesome it is to not have to pay taxes.
It's going up like $20/month for 2013. Which is immaterial, since it was ridiculous to begin with, because the entire system is broken.
I get the feeling it was cited as an example to make the reforms look stupid, even though it doesn't actually have any negatives.
