Health Care Reform: Implications for the Property/Casualty Insurance Industry

This PowerPoint report, present by Steven Weisbart, senior vice president and chief economist of the Insurance Information Institute, before the Insurance Council of New Jersey, focuses on four key healthcare reform issues. They are: inflation and the cost of healthcare; cost shifting; grant proposals for alternatives to litigation; and how regulation of health insurance policies will affect P/C insurance. Concerning the first point, the report addresses the question of whether healthcare reform will slow the growth in the cost of providing healthcare, noting that millions more Americans will soon be using medical services, an estimated 32 million people who were not covered before will have health insurance and many people of the “baby boom” generation will begin qualifying for Medicare. A section on the implications of the reform on the property/casualty insurance industry notes that once new patterns of regulation are developed for healthcare insurance, it could be easy for regulators and legislators to apply them to other lines of insurance.