Quote Originally Posted by Slamy View Post
My cousin who has been buying his own family insurance for years pays 500 a month. He just got a letter from blue/cross blue shield that his rate next year would be 1100 a month. The increase is to encompass all the crap obama care tells insurance companies they need to provide to people. Not trying to be political but this thing is a mess.
The individual mandate gets all the press, but coverage mandates are a huge driver of medical cost inflation. Normally they're bought and paid for by special interests. It goes like this: business/industry cannot compete in marketplace, business/industry bribes politicians with sexual favors to make their product/service mandatory for insurance coverage. Or you have stupid things like the 27 year old slacker mandate which is an implicit subsidy from the poor to the rich, especially from today's poor to tomorrow's rich (a subsidy from a 20 year old full time walmart worker who must accept a lower wager/higher tax/lower benefit to accommodate the mandatory coverage for the children he doesn't have, to the 26 year old grad student who receives the free coverage). Obamacare even has one such coverage mandate for faith healing. Srsly.

IMO do away with all coverage mandates. The governments role should not be to mandate options, but to educate on them. If you must, pare it back to what is basically necessary. Think of cars, we have mandated seatbelts and airbags, but not power windows, moon roofs, and alloy wheels. If the government wants to run ads saying "Make sure your insurance covers faith healing, or else!" Fine, but making us all pay for it is stupid. Let Amazon, Google, some other enterprising company do the comparisons and contrasts. Have you seen Amazon's mobile phone site? Imagine that for healthcare. That is what you need.

But essentially now we're all mandated to drive fully loaded Cadillacs with prepaid regular maintenance. And people wonder why it costs so much.