The next time someone tells you that the free market is responsible for the high premiums in health insurance tell them that we have never had a free market and the health insurers must meet state mandates just as they will under a federal government takeover of healthcare.

Health insurance in New Jersey, for example,  costs nearly twice as much as the national average, and is the highest of almost any state, according to Michael Bond, a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis.  The state controls premiums in order to reflect the health risks of individual consumers (called community rating); therefore, low risk healthy individuals are charged more for insurance than they would otherwise be because they have to carry the burden of the cost of higher risk individuals who suffer from avoidable illnesses.

Here is a good example of how government policies effect price.

A healthy 25-year-old male could purchase a policy for $960 a year in conservative Kentucky, according to a 2005 study, but would pay about $5,880 in liberal New Jersey.