Life expectancy at birth and health care spending per capita

From OECD's Health at a Glance 2013 report.  See if you can find the outlier.



Thanks to the Incidental Economist for calling attention to this chart.

I knew the individual health insurance market was broken, but I didn't realize it was this broken

Jonathan Cohn's Six Things the Media Doesn't Understand About Obamacare is an excellent read. I've been mulling the implications of this quote he includes, from Karen Pollitz:

In the traditional market, virtually all states require that renewal rate increases must be uniform for all policyholders in a block.  But insurers can close a block, starving it of influx of newly underwritten policyholders, so rates will spiral.  Healthy people in the block will tend to bail because they can still pass underwriting and so move to other, more favorably rated policies.  Sick people stranded in the block will all face the same rate increase at renewal, but it will spiral even more rapidly as risk profile of the block deteriorates.

For someone who is in the individual health insurance market, This. Is. Creepy.  People with employer-provided insurance or Medicare have no idea how broken things are.  Thankfully, on January 1st, 2014 Obamacare ends these games and allows the free market to function properly.

Six Things the Media Doesn't Understand About Obamacare

This article by Jonathan Cohn does an outstanding job of clearing things up.

Update: Jonathan Chait explains Why Letting Everyone Keep Their Health-Care Plan Is a Terrible Idea.

Update #2: Kevin Drum reminds people that Obamacare Will Be a Boon For Millions.

The governors of Connecticut, Kentucky and Washington on how they got Obamacare running so well in their states

http://www.salon.com/2013/11/18/dem_governors_explain_how_they_got_obamacare_working/