[3am]

Did you read the links in your post? The first doesn't strongly support your points, and the second was out of date almost 4 months ago.

And that's really saying something, because the first link is an OpEd by Mitt Romney's former health care advisor who is a senior fellow at a conservative think-tank.

Some of the downsides of allowing health insurance to be sold across state lines are addressed at http://www.kaiserhealthnews.org/stories/2010/september/30/se... - and they include an AEI fellow's views for balance. The auto insurance market is a hybrid, though, and doesn't show a large cost savings for states that effectively allow cross-state lines operations via identical regulations.

I think it's also fair to ask also why health insurers that operate in all/most states (UnitedHealth, Aetna, Cigna, Athena, etc) are not substantially cheaper that BC/BS peers that don't.