Negative Space: insurance
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- Government-run insurance
- Government organizations don’t have any incentive to sell you shit. Their goal is to tax you. Providing services or products is only an excuse to tax.
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
- The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
More Information
- The Real Trouble With the Birth-Control Mandate
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John H. Cochrane expounds on the idiocy of government regulations that tie health care to your employer rather than to you.
“Insurance is a bad idea for small, regular and predictable expenses. There are good reasons that your car insurance company doesn’t add $100 per year to your premium and then cover oil changes, and that your health insurance doesn’t charge $50 more per year and cover toothpaste. You’d have to fill out mountains of paperwork, the oil-change and toothpaste markets would become much less competitive, and you’d end up spending more.”
- Supreme Court and health insurance part II
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“Meanwhile, staggeringly inefficient markets for health care itself need a thorough, competition-focused deregulation. Americans will know there's a healthy market when hospitals post prices on their websites, and when new hospital and health-care businesses routinely enter to challenge the old ones. Here too regulations keep competition at bay.”
