No matter what you hear from the other side of the aisle, MNsure is working. How do we know?  Minnesota has one of the highest percentages of insured people at the lowest rates in the U.S.

There’s been a lot of press about PreferredOne leaving MNsure. Why did they do it? It was a business decision. Roger Feldman, a University of Minnesota public health profession, said PreferredOne made a mistake by offering too-low premiums in 2014 to attract market share. He’s studied what he calls “lowball bidding phenomenon”. He says fast enrollment growth like PreferredOne saw can strain a smaller insurer. And, that raises costs rather than lowers them. “In my experience this never works,” he said. “I’m actually not surprised that (PreferredOne) left.”

In the Sunday, September 21, 2014, StarTribune, business columnist Lee Schafer put PreferredOne’s decision in context by saying this:  “It’s hard to see how the exit of PreferredOne last week could be played as a failure for MNSure. After all, the MNsure state health insurance exchange is just another market. The low-price player wasn’t making any money, and it decided to get out. That’s sort of the way markets are supposed to work.”

Republican complain about MNsure, but they still haven’t told us what they’d replace it with. GOP gubernatorial candidate Jeff Johnson said he’d repeal it. That’d send us back to the days when insurance companies wrote the rules an people were denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, paid for preventive care and had coverage that was capped. Minnesotan doesn’t wan to return to a time of insurance company abuses. They want to move forward with our current healthcare reforms because it’s helping all of us receive they care we need at lower prices for families and businesses.

health insurance · MNsure

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Daily Brief: Tuesday, Sept. 23rd, 2014 >>