The furor over the recent mammogram recommendation illustrates how distorted our assumptions about health care and health insurance have become, distortions which the Senate and House bills only exacerbate.<\/p>\n
In a saner world, where medical consumers paid for routine services, women would use the new information about breast cancer screening to decide for themselves how the costs of possibly superfluous screening measure up against their own tolerance for risk.\u00a0\u00a0 If they wanted the extra security, they would pay for it.\u00a0 Instead, thanks to our assumption that every medical procedure should be paid for by someone else as a virtual entitlement, any new treatment consensus becomes a matter of national concern\u2014and, in the case of Republicans, a certain amount of opportunistic grandstanding as well.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
It\u2019s no more logical to have so-called \u201cinsurance\u201d for foreseeable, routine medical needs than it would be to have employer-subsidized grocery insurance.\u00a0 Food costs would shoot up as grocery stores hired reams of clerks to manage the reimbursement paperwork.\u00a0 Hungry customers would wait in little antechambers filling out forms in triplicate before they could collect their \u201cfree\u201d gallon of milk.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Rather than giving health consumers more choice, however, the Senate and House bills define a minimum level of benefits that all insurers must offer and fail to allow consumers to buy insurance across state lines.\u00a0 As a result of this regulatory paternalism, any promise of savings is chimerical.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019m inclined to support a mandate to buy insurance, since I\u2019m not charitable enough to happily bail out someone who decided to take a risk on catastrophic health costs and can\u2019t pay his hospital bills.\u00a0 I suppose, however, that in a world where the bad bets of the uninsured get passed along to the insured or to the taxpayers, one very quickly reproduces the over-regulated insurance mess that we find ourselves in.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The furor over the recent mammogram recommendation illustrates how distorted our assumptions about health care and health insurance have become, distortions which the Senate and House bills only exacerbate. In a saner world, where medical consumers paid for routine services, … Continue reading