Quote Originally Posted by zspeed24 View Post
My wife's company is based out of SC and her employer offers Blue Cross Blue Shield of South Carolina, the plan to cover her and my son was 530 a month for the exact same plan with blue cross blue shield of Georgia it costs us 319 a month for all three of us, but people who live in SC cannot buy insurance with BCBS GA on an individual basis. This is why conservatives want it open to buy across state lines.
I would imagine the difference in cost might have something to do with the statutes governing healthcare being different between the two states though, the demographics being different between the two areas, etc etc.

If I run a life insurance company out of Minneapolis, MN... I might have different criteria and a different system of rating customers than if I ran a life insurance company out of Baltimore or Detroit. Allowing insurance companies to do business across state lines might work well to reduce costs to some consumers, but in practice I imagine most insurers would want to stick to their bases and not take on added risk.

Also, Blue Cross, Kaiser and the other giants would probably just centralize their structure (no need for the overhead of 50 branches when one will do the job).