Focus on medical costs

I have been licensed in Kentucky as a life and health insurance agent since 1993. Medicaid is not regulated by the Kentucky Department of Insurance, is not sold nor placed by licensed insurance agents, requires no premium, has no open enrollment period and is not an insurance product.

So for the sake of accurate reporting and public understanding of a critical issue (skyrocketing medical costs), is it accurate to include Medicaid enrollees in the number of insured? Medicaid and insurance have only one thing in common: both are options for covering one’s health-care costs.

So is going self-insured (uninsured). If we counted the uninsured, who are by definition self-insured, among the insured, wouldn’t that bring the percentage of “insured” close to 100 and fix the problem?

Of course not. But it might move our focus from the red herring (big bad insurance companies) onto issues like the skyrocketing cost of medical care. If we truly believe that insurance companies are the problem, what sense is there to a federal law requiring everyone to purchase their wares? Not much. Then again, it made some of us feel better. Maybe we can spend the next eight years identifying and fixing the real problem.

This story was originally published October 18, 2016 at 7:07 PM with the headline "Focus on medical costs."