Health Insurance Executive Says His Company Favors a Federal Requirement to Purchase Health Insurance

You're shocked, I'm sure:

A top executive with the state's largest health insurer on Thursday defended requiring most Americans to have health coverage by 2014.

"Our position is that we favor a mandate," said Matt All, vice president and chief legal counsel at Blue Cross Blue Shield of Kansas.

…Dropping the so-called individual mandate from the federal health reform law, he said, would "create a dangerous set of conditions," noting that without the requirement, large numbers of people would be free to put off buying health insurance until they were sick.

Such an arrangement, he said, would wreak havoc in the insurance industry.

Since the passage of the PPACA, health insurers have lobbied for more permissive regulations. But at the same time, they've continued to lobby for the mandate, which is expected to bring them millions of new customers, most of whom will be subsidized. At this point, it seems that a number of investors in the industry are looking at the law as a new business opportunity. When the federal government decides to require the purchase of your industry's product and subsidize millions of new "customers" to do so, it's clearly some kind of opportunity. But I'm not sure I'd call it a business.