Medical insurance, not free health care
April 14th, 2009 | by Brian Schwartz |Economist Arnold Kling’s outline on his forthcoming health care debate are below. I especially like point 5, on what insurance should be. For more on that, see his essay, Insurance vs. Insulation.
tags: Overtreated, real insurance1. I am the radical in the debate. A free-market health care system is a much greater departure from our current system than a single-payer system.
2. From an individual point of view, the ideal health care system is one that gives you all the medical services you want without your having to pay for them. In the aggregate, however, that leads to runaway health care spending.
3. What we think of as health insurance is not really insurance. Instead, it is designed to provide you with medical services without your having to pay for them.
4. Americans make extravagant use of medical procedures with high costs and low benefits.
5. I would like for all Americans to have real health insurance. However, such insurance would not enable you to obtain whatever you want without paying for it. Instead, it would pay for unusually large and persistent medical expenses. Government involvement ought to be limited to vouchers that enable the very poor and the very sick to obtain such insurance.
