Some middle-aged men wile away their spare time fantasizing about nubile swimsuit models jumping on trampolines. I, on the other hand, fantasize about free markets and living in a world chock full of them. This can probably be explained by my love of freedom, and my distaste for trampolines.
We need a free market in health care, as we do in everything. In the past, we have been a country of innovation and accomplishment. Even the limited amount of free market activity we were able to squeeze out between the cracks of our economic meshwork was enough to make us exceptional. But we are no longer able to sustain. We have been overtaken by an ideology that used to be considered both foreign and undesirable. The reasons are clear. By creating an unstable base of operation for our lives, government and its corporate partners have cast a pall of hopelessness over us. All thick and blankety.
I’ve lamented on this blog and elsewhere that there is no constituency for freedom. But I don’t remember things ever being this bad. Just a few years ago, liberal/collectivist types were so ashamed of their labels that they became “progressives.” Now, we are instructed daily that a little socialism is fine. And besides, it’s not really socialism if the majority wants it.
That’s wrong on so many levels that I can’t think about it without my head trying to explode. So, I’m going to take our fake health care debate and our fake choices and try to boil down the fake answers to those that make sense in our collectivist-corporatist economic system.
First – Health insurance is not health care. I can’t make the point strongly enough. Health care is what you do every day. It’s your lifestyle, what you eat, whether you walk or take the car, how much or how little you run on stress, whether you take vitamins or get enough sunlight. That kind of thing.
The debate over “health care” is really a debate over health insurance. So, let’s fix health insurance and let government move on and break something else it can then “fix.”
There are a couple of easy measures that could end the entire debate and would garner wide support:
1. Portability. Your insurance is now completely portable because congress says so. See how easy that was? And congress can do just that. Insurance can no longer be a benefit of or tied in any way to a job. That means you can change jobs and not worry. And you can lose your job for a while with a lot less worry. No employer incentives to provide insurance. No tax breaks for insurance payments, either corporate or individual. This is really the easiest and most obvious place to fix insurance. And we can thank those who want to keep government big and growing for the fact that it has not been fixed before.
2. High Deductible, Low Cost Plans. This is what insurance is supposed to look like. Insurance isn’t supposed to pay for coughs and colds. It’s supposed to pay for the big stuff. And with no more tax and employer incentives to buy Cadillac plans, these plans would be very popular. In fact, I have one myself. Even though it has a higher deductible than my previous policy, the premiums are much lower. I am able to save enough that the savings would cover the deductible every couple of years if need be. Of course, since I rarely get sick and never go to the doctor, I get to pocket that money instead.
3. Medical Savings Accounts.These go along with number 2. I hate the idea of adding to a tax code that shouldn’t exist at all in my free market, no trampoline world. But being allowed to save enough to cover three to five years of insurance deductibles tax free in an account that could be rolled over from year to year would certainly make a lot of sense. It would create a bit of a pseudo-market in the low end of care. And that might actually keep costs down in the long run.
4. Insurability. Another easy fix. Pre-existing conditions? No problem. Poof, you’re insured. Congress, again, simply needs to say so. And insurance companies, now being fully collectivist and happy to follow government commands, will go right along with it. Let’s say they can rate someone by 15% for each pre-existing condition. Because we have to face the fact that in our collectivist world, when someone shows up with a serious illness and is uninsured, the hospitals and practitioners and government merely pass the cost on to us anyway. Might as well get them insured and get a few premium payments from them before they show up at the hospital.
In our fake debate with fake choices, those are the easiest and most workable solutions. We don’t need to mandate tort reform because that would be un-American. And in a fake debate with fake choices, this may be the most fake of all. Democrats love trial lawyers. Republicans hate them. So Republican are always trying to squeeze the lawyers out. Sorry, elections have consequences and this is one of them. The trial lawyers win this round. And the cost of malpractice insurance is just one more thing that gets passed along to patients anyway. No business pays taxes or insurance costs. They are always passed on to the consumer.
So, that’s my non-market answer in this fake debate. Until next time.
