This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, March 14th,

2024. I'm Caleb Brown. Short-term limited duration

insurance plans are meant to be a stopgap between coverage by other health

insurance policies. They're also largely without the federal mandates and

controls that are the hallmarks of modern American health insurance.

The Biden administration wants to make them less helpful to Americans to make the short-term

duration even shorter.

Kitos Michael Cannon explains why this is terrible news for sick Americans in a new paper.

We'll dispense with the history for now because there is sort of a fascinating history of the politics of health insurance and health coverage.

But we'll leave that aside just for now.

Describe what is a short-term limited duration insurance plan.

Short-term limited-durations insurance is a creature of Congress.

When Congress passed some health insurance regulations back in 1996.

It said these will apply to everything except for

this thing that we'll call short-term limited duration insurance

and then it didn't define that.

But whatever it is, it's exempt from federal health insurance regulations not just the ones

they passed in 96 but all of them even Obamacare it's exempt from everything and as a

result these plans are able to provide as much or as little

coverage as consumers want because they respond to the needs of consumers

rather than the dictates of politicians and bureaucrats who come up with

all of these regulations in Obamacare and other federal laws.

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