Dr. Phil O’Connor is President of PROactive Strategies, a Chicago consulting firm providing advice in the energy and insurance industries. For over two decades Phil has been recognized as a leading advocate of competitive market solutions for regulated businesses.
In addition to a lengthy career in the private sector, Phil has had extensive government and political experience, having chaired the Illinois Commerce Commission serving as Director of the Illinois Department of Insurance and as a member of the Illinois State Board of Elections. From March 2007 to March 2008, Phil worked in the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, Iraq with the US Army Corps of Engineers and the US State Department as an advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of Electricity.
A magna cum laude graduate of Loyola University of Chicago, Phil received his Masters and Doctorate in Political Science from Northwestern University.
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Judy Mintel was in the General Counsel’s Office of the State Farm Insurance Companies and has been a corporate attorney for more than 30 years. Since 2005, she has taught at the University of Chicago Law School where she is a Lecturer in Law and Adjunct Professor teaching upper level seminars in “Complex Corporate Litigation Management.” She earned her J.D. from the University of Chicago Law School and her A.B. from the University of Chicago College.
She is the author of a book, Insurance Rate Litigation published by the S. S. Huebner Foundation for Insurance Education, University of Pennsylvania, (1983, 344 pages) which is on the required reading list of the Casualty Actuarial Society and she has published many articles about insurance and public policy.
She has experience as a financial regulator in the Commonwealth of Virginia where she was Special Deputy Insurance Commissioner and she was an administrative law judge for the State Corporation Commission.
Philip O'Connor and Judith Mintel
Health Care Reform: Getting Our Language Right
by Philip O'Connor and Judith MintelThe headline has changed from “health care reform” to “health insurance reform” because politicians can’t go wrong politically by firing salvos at health insurance companies. People aren’t fond of the institutions that handle the majority of the money paid for health services even if they are happy with the care itself. Unfortunately, calling the leading proposals in Congress insurance reform is false advertising. The basic flaw is that insurance for medical expenses will no longer exist.
If the Commissioner of Baseball announced “baseball reform” that included elimination of pitching, batting and fielding, we would no longer have baseball even if there was a ball and bases involved. Similarly, the leading Congressional proposals violate key principles of insurance by prohibiting underwriting, pricing, and product design based on risk assessment.
Why does this matter? Because the absence of a true insurance product and the lack of a private, competitive insurance market will mean that the program will not work as intended to provide improvements in affordability and availability of medical expense reimbursement.
The essence of insurance is the transfer of risk and individual risk assessment for losses that for any given individual are unexpected and unpredictable. As Sherlock Holmes explained to Dr. Watson in The Sign of the Four:
while the individual man is an insoluble puzzle, in the aggregate he becomes a mathematical certainty. You can, for example, never foretell what any one man will do, but you can say with precision what an average number will be up to. Individuals vary, but percentages remain constant.
Legislation that ignores the great detective’s words cannot rightly be called insurance.
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