If RedStateVT reads this he might have a different angle, but today's musing comes from the NYT Business pages where I found a really good summary of why Health Care Policy is complicated and why a public option is necessary for a well functioning individual market for health insurance.
I am backing off a Universal Single Payer Plan for the moment, not because I don't believe that to be a worthy objective, but because I think we need an intermediate step from HeritageFoundation/Romney/ObamaCare, which is for better or worse our starting point. You have to recognize that most Americans are insured through their employers with insurance policies issued by shareholder owned companies. These companies employ a lot of people.
But what is the key complaint about ObamaCare? It is the high deductibles and high policy premiums. One path to controlling that would be to get the high cost patients into a public option, but would that cause Medicare costs and premiums to rise significantly? That would be a major problem for many elderly.
So the short answer is I don't know for sure but what I do know is the Ronald Reagan era government with a GOP majority in Congress passed a law mandating that hospitals care for anyone who shows up at their doors. This is also what the Hippocratic Oath calls for and so we have a 2000+ year old societal agreement that Dr's care for anyone who needs help. Now the only real question/issue is how do we as a society pay for it.
The GOP likes to believe that market based systems will control this expense, so at it's core, there is a segment of the GOP that acknowledges that Health Care is right and we do not want people dying in the streets because of a lack of access to health care.
The article today lays out why Externalities, a lack of knowledge by consumers, the necessity for health insurance to protect against catastrophic loss, the fact that the presence of insurance leads to overconsumption of medical care, and the risk of adverse selection in a pure market based system make reform a very complicated proposition and one that needs a lot of thought. Something in short supply in Congress and the White House these days.
Link to "Why Health Care Policy Is So Hard"
This is really worth reading. I hope Congresspeople do because they have to come up with something better.
I don't think that we have EVER had a "market-based" health care system. Even before the ACA gov't told ins cos where they can sell and what they had to cover. O'care made this worse. A key issue I focus on now is this ridiculous system where every time you go to the doctor it generates mountains of paperwork, i.e. EOBs, bills, etc. Americans should pay out of pocket for all normal health care costs. Involve the ins. cos. only when something large or catastrophic occurs. Final question: if gov't-run health care is so great, why isn't everyone clamoring for VA - like benefits and services?
ReplyDeleteI think they are clamoring for VA benefits and services, just not the service at the VA hospitals which should be more like that at the non-VA hospitals.
Delete