MLR bomb…

There is a amazing piece in Forbes that Tim Worstall (also at Forbes) notes reporting on scary news that is misleading:

I’m very confused by this piece from fellow Forbes contributor Rick Ungar. He tells us that there’s a bomb buried in Obamacare (or more formally, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and that it’s just gone off. Further, that it will mean the end of private, for profit, health care insurance on any large scale: whatever remains will be just a luxury item for those who like to beat the queues as such insurance is in the UK where we have the NHS.

Angry Bear’s Bruce Webb noted the MLR in the legislation on July 28, 2009 (and here and here), among the first to offer analysis, but hardly a surprise now.

Tim [edited for clarity] quotes Ungar and then refutes:

That would be the provision of the law, called the medical loss ratio, that requires health insurance companies to spend 80% of the consumers’ premium dollars they collect—85% for large group insurers—on actual medical care rather than overhead, marketing expenses and profit. Failure on the part of insurers to meet this requirement will result in the insurers having to send their customers a rebate check representing the amount in which they underspend on actual medical care.

This is the true ‘bomb’ contained in Obamacare and the one item that will have more impact on the future of how medical care is paid for in this country than anything we’ve seen in quite some time. Indeed, it is this aspect of the law that represents the true ‘death panel’ found in Obamacare—but not one that is going to lead to the death of American consumers. Rather, the medical loss ratio will, ultimately, lead to the death of large parts of the private, for-profit health insurance industry.

Why? Because there is absolutely no way for-profit health insurers are going to be able to learn how to get by and still make a profit while being forced to spend at least 80 percent of their receipts providing their customers with the coverage for which they paid.

What confuses me here is that in a competitive market it’s entirely normal for an insurer to have a loss ratio higher than 80%. There are plenty of entirely profitable and growing insurance companies that have loss ratios over 100%. So I cannot really understand why the law insisting on an MLR of 80% (or 85% in the large group market) is going to cause all for profit insurance companies to fall over.

Now of course one wonders what is important in addition to this scarey announcement of a medical cost bomb? Issues of accounting for expenses, a more recent mlr formula that is more permissive, enforcement issues. And even why the ratios may be central as a part of the legislation. Another post of course.