Tom said, "Due to all the govt regulations, it is impossible to have a low cost market based policy"
No, Tom prior to the ACA health insurance companies gamed the system in various ways to create the illusion of affordable products. Some of the ways they did this include but are not limited to the following.
1. If you had a preexisting condition 90% of the time you were excluded from buying a policy no matter how much you were willing to pay. I remember there was one company that excluded anyone from buying a policy that ever sought treatment for acne. Insurance companies cherry-picked to such a degree that they would offer coverage to only the healthiest people excluding a large segment of the population. If there is no policy for you to buy at any price that is a market failure.
2. There were lifetime limits and yearly limits on medical treatments. The most common one was 100k a year and 250k lifetime. So if you were unlucky enough to buy one of these policies with a yearly limit of 100k you only really had $82,500 dollars worth of coverage in any given year by the time you factor in your out of pocket.
3. There were separate out of pocket limits on prescription drugs and medical treatment. Many people discovered that what they thought was a $17.5k out of pocket max was really a 35k out of pocket max.
4. A lot of companies played this network vs out of network expenses game. Typically, you had a wide variety of relatively inexpensive GPs you could see, but all specialists were out of network meaning if you had something more serious than a GP could handle your out of pocket limits did not apply.
5. A lot of common illnesses/diseases were excluded all together such as mental health and substance abuse. Most of the companies writing individual polices refused to cover childbirth or complications arising from childbirth. One company got caught excluding common cancers. They would bury the exclusions in the fine print never mentioning the word cancer instead of calling them their technical medical names so unless you had an MD it was unlikely you would notice them until it was too late.
6. A lot of common treatments had caps of their own. It wasn't unusual for mental health treatment to be limited to a few thousand per-year or organ transplants to 100k. Try getting an organ transplant for 100k Tom.
7. Finally, if all else failed the insurance company could get out of paying for practically anything by deeming your treatment experimental or the costs of your treatment non-usual and customary. I worked on these cases as a young law clerk. Insurance companies would routinely deny common cancer treatments as experimental even though they had been the standard treatment for the last twenty years. By regulation, insured people are prohibited from suing the insurance companies unless they jump through all sorts of hoops. Often the insurance companies would delay these cases as long as possible hoping the patient died or that the treatment would no longer be "beneficial" because their condition worsened. That is actually a defense the insurance company has if they wrongfully deny treatment long enough they can still win the case by saying because of their delay the treatment would no longer be effective. The only legal recovery for the patient via the regulation is to get their treatment even if the insurance company had no valid reason to deny their claim. They aren't allowed by regulation to get damages or attorney's fees. So unless the patient had a couple of 100k banked away for litigation and 2-3 years to wait for their litigation to run its course they were SOL. Insurance companies still do this even under the ACA.
Most of the regulations you are complaining about Tom actually work for the insurance companies benefit. They are also exempt from anti-trust regulation.
Like I said, complete market failure.
