With all this recent talk about universal healthcare and two tier health care, more and more people are wondering “Will universal healthcare have any effect on private insurance companies?” they wonder if people staying with private insurance companies will have to pay higher costs to cover the losses, or if the service they receive will be negatively effected in any way. This is a very important question that has no clear answer. To see the true effects of universal health care on private insurance companies, we will have to wait a few years to see where we all stand. For example, just because there is a universal health care plan, that doesn’t mean everyone is going to opt for it, and that doesn’t mean it is going to be a success.
People who have the choice, usually the more financially stable people, are going to want to stay with the private option, as there is almost no way a universal plan can compete with a private plan. But, poorer people who have never had healthcare before are going to opt for the universal plan and they may start to visit medical facilities more often, which will cause delays for everyone, which has become a huge problem in socialized countries like Canada. How will the private insurance companies respond? Will they raise their rates? Probably not, because they will probably lose very few of their customers. If someone could afford health care from a private insurance company before, hey probably won’t want to downgrade their service and use the universal plan. So, *will universal healthcare have any effect on private insurance companies*? The answer to that question is both yes and no, based on the aforementioned reasoning. Of course there will be some effect, but the extent of the effects and the actual cost that the private insurance companies will actually have to absorb is yet to be seen. So, for now, the effects are not empirically known, but in a short period of time we will be able to see how universal healthcare has changed the way private insurance companies operate.
