Speaking before the United States Congress House Committee on Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, Scott Gottlieb, Resident Fellow at American Enterprise Institute (AEI), has suggested that blockchain technology has the potential to make the market for health insurance more robust, competitive, and high value.
He started off admitting that he has been a critic of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) since its inception. Gottlieb added that he wants to focus on some of the current trends and offer market-based reforms that he believes are “universal”.
He suggested that a more technologically advanced risk pool would have the capacity to auto-regulate insurance subsidies in real time, adding that such a system could employ a blockchain, CoinDesk reported.
"The designations that follow individuals in such a hypothetical insurance pool, which would indicate the existence of their adjusted subsidies and thus their underlying medical condition, would need to be completely de-identified in advance of enrollment and impenetrable to disclosures. But there are other economic constructs that trade contractual information with units of value and that allow these exchanges to be made anonymously. Blockchain, for example, incorporates some of these features”, Gottlieb noted.
Highlighting the need for innovation in health insurance market, he recommended more rating and regulatory flexibility for insurance products to enable more competition between more innovative insurance plan designs.
He concluded saying:
“Our health care reforms should be aimed at increasing choice and competition as a way to give consumers more options and more opportunities to access affordable coverage…Whether we are aiming to reform our existing framework or craft an entirely new policy approach to how we encourage consumers to pool risk and shop for coverage, there are some universal principles that should govern any policy prescription.”
