“Medicare has lower administrative costs”

Wednesday, August 13th, 2008

I often hear this from people who defeind confiscating taxpayer's money without their consent to pay for a government run insurance program for the elderly.  They use this argument to justify wanting "Medicare for all."  How does a defender of individual respond?  Here's a way: "If government employees can keep administrative ...

Colorado Amendment 56: bad idea

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

From Monday's Denver Post: the United Food and Commercial Workers Local 7 plans to submit its signatures for a pair of initiatives Wednesday. The UFCW measures would mandate companies with 20 or more employees to provide health-care coverage... [Amendment 56] To get a clear picture of how this mandate would play out, ...

Make ‘em argue honestly for community rating

Tuesday, July 29th, 2008

Summary: Community rating (CR) forbids insurance companies from risk-rating their premiums.  Say someone supports this because it supposedly helps make insurance more affordable and accessible to higher-risk consumers.  You could counter this with empirical evidence that it's not effective.  But more effective is to expose CR as a stealth method to force ...

How to argue for Health Savings Accounts

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Summary: The best defense of Health Savings Accounts is not that they promote wise spending and bring costs down. It's that they are a step toward a more ethical tax policy. Conservatives, Republicans, and free-market advocates often tout Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) as a means of controlling costs.  Yet, critics of HSAs will ...

Incremental persuasion: Medicare and Medicaid

Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

This post is about incremental persuasion and Medicare, and is intended for those who value each individual's freedom to choose whether or not to give to charity, which charity to support, and persuading others to share the same value.  If this does not describe you, I beg of you not ...