Health Insurance and Medical Pot: Be Careful What You Wish For

Health Insurance and Medical Pot: Be Careful What You Wish For

Medical marijuana is expensive. One way to address the issue is to put pressure on health insurance companies in hopes that they will cover it. After all, they could easily include medical marijuana in their prescription drug programs. But wait. Be careful what you wish for. Involving health insurance companies and the medical marijuana arena could cause more problems than it solves.

The fact that health insurance and medical marijuana are discussed together is an indication of just how unhappy people are with prices. By contrast, people who could buy a week’s worth of medicine for a few dollars probably wouldn’t care all that much if health insurance were involved.

Health insurance coverage really boils down to how policymakers want to tackle high prices. If you are in the pro-health insurance camp, consider the following four reasons it might not be wise to bring insurance companies into it:

1. Insurance Companies Love Quotas

Have you ever felt like you can’t get enough time with your GP? You spend an hour in the waiting room before being shuffled to the exam room. Another 20 minutes goes by before the doctor finally arrives. He gives you about 10 minutes of his time before moving on. Meanwhile, you walk out with few answers and a new prescription.

This scenario exists because insurance companies love quotas. They dictate how many patients a doctor has to see on any given day. They enforce their quotas through the way they reimburse for services. Doctors work very hard to meet quota requirements so as to not lose out on revenue. Thus, you don’t get the time you deserve.

The same thing would be repeated if health insurance were introduced into the medical cannabis arena. Doctors would shuffle patients through as quickly as they can.

2. Insurance Companies Qualify Conditions

Next up, consider the fact that insurance companies qualify those conditions for which they are willing to pay. Even if the state recognizes your condition as a qualifying condition for medical marijuana use, there is no guarantee a health insurance company would cover your prescription. All they would have to do to justify such a position is classify medical cannabis as elective therapy.

3. Insurance Companies Raise Prices

Just by shielding consumers from pricing reality, insurance companies drive up prices. They do so by limiting competition and willingly covering higher rates dictated by Medicare and Medicaid. Pull health insurance into the medical cannabis environment and prices will almost certainly go up.

Utahmarijuana.org is but one organization that insists prices are already too high. They know all too well how patients struggle to afford their medications. Pulling insurance companies into the industry would temporarily alleviate the problem at the retail level, but at what cost? Health insurance premiums would almost certainly go up significantly.

You might argue that premium hikes would be less than the amount saved by not having to pay the full cost of medical cannabis out-of-pocket. And that might be true, but only because premium increases are spread out across entire pools of subscribers instead of just the medical cannabis users. Either way you look at it, prices go up.

4. Other Ways to Control Pricing

If we have learned anything from 20 years of debating healthcare reform, it should be that there are other ways to control pricing. Turning things over to insurance companies rarely creates the results we are aiming for. More often than not, it exacerbates existing problems. If you are hoping insurance companies get involved in medical cannabis, be careful what you wish for.