And that’s probably why you haven’t seen Republicans proposing this legislation although it would make a TON of sense and is vastly more bipartisan than the current legislation. Instead they’re pretty much only offering opposition. A shame, but there it is.

A few years ago I worked for a small firm. We had 10 people (some with family plans) on our health insurance plan. Two employees were considering the family plan offered by our employer, but declined because they had better options elsewhere. Their decisions to not go with our plan increased my monthly premium (single coverage) from $250 to $500. This is a ridiculous increase; the insurer doesn’t spread its risk over our 10/12 employees but over the 500,000 (or whatever) people insured in our state. But they charged us as if they were only insuring the 10 of us.

I am sure that one of the reasons for the big increase is that the insurance broker is paid a large commission for “selling” our account. A few employees more or less can make a big difference in whether that commission (plus the insurer’s other costs and profits) is fully covered by our premiums.

As with the subprime mortgage mess, a lot of the problem with our insurance industry has to do with the fact that the principal (the bank, the insurance company) doesn’t pay employees to sell the product (mortgage, insurance plan) to the end customer, but pays a large commission to someone with no skin in the game.

(As a side note, the insurance broker for my firm actually told us that we would have certain coverage, even though the insurance policy contract stated clearly that that was not the case. Given that we were a firm of lawyers, you would think this woman would not have the gall to lie to us when we clearly knew she was lying. And you wonder why this situation is such a mess…)

I wonder though, is it too much of a seismic shift for the American public, or too much of a seismic shift for the political class?