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Here’s another reminder of why we need to make health care and health insurance cheaper: Arizona, facing a budget shortfall, will drop 10,000 people from one of its insurance programs.
To show you how bizarre public policy makes health care, these people are adults who are enrolled in a program for … children.
Anyway, I suspect that most of them are people who had insurance coverage through work, lost their jobs and now have trouble making COBRA payments. Now they’re hostage to the financial condition of their state government.
Had they been able to purchase individual insurance in a competitive marketplace, it’s possible they would have been able to buy cheaper insurance that fit their own needs (rather than what the employer chose) and which would stay with them into unemployment.
Being unemployed always brings financial challenges, but thanks to the many distortions introduced by our public policies, the adjustment seems to be harder in health care and health insurance than other needs such as food or shelter.
Cross-posted from State House Call.
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