On Mon, 12 Mar 2012 05:34:39 +0000 (UTC), Przemek Klosowski
wrote:

On Thu, 01 Mar 2012 16:28:11 -0500, Ed Huntress wrote:

On Thu, 1 Mar 2012 12:59:59 -0800 (PST), Josh Rosenbluth
wrote:

I thought it was cheaper for insurance companies to provide
contraception than not to because of the cost of pregnancy care.

You're right. However, it's more complicated.

...

But here's a point that's not often considered outside of the industry,
regarding private insurers: The average person remains with one private
insurer for a bit more than 3-1/2 years. Like most forms of preventive
care, private insurers find that there is no benefit to them in
providing it. If they do, some other insurance company is likely to reap
the benefit.

I studied this in regard to diabetes prevention, and the same principles
apply to contraception. Insurance companies don't talk much about it,
but their incentive to provide preventive treatment of any kind is small
or nonexistent. Financially, it's generally a loser for them. So it's
the kind of thing that you can only make work through regulation -- like
seat belts or fireproof materials in an automobile.
The natural, market-driven incentives in both cases are perverse. That's
when you need regulation.

Exactly---and that is why the insurance companies support such broad
mandate: it levels the field by denying the unfair advantage of skimping
such coverage. The end result is that everybody is more profitable.

That's true. As long as our insurance companies are for-profit (unlike
those of Switzerland, which are not-for-profit and which have a much
more effective set of business incentives to serve the insured), the
whole package of the ACA is a big winner for them.

That's why it won't do anything, as it is, to bring costs down. But
it's a first step.

--
Ed Huntress