Real Health Care Reform
Ronald Bailey is a contributor to Reason magazine, and is probably one of the more sane voices when it comes to unfortunately politicized topics like Climate Change and Health Care. Everyone agrees that our Health Care system in America is ‘broken’ (although it seems if you asked them how it was broken, they’d just parrot talking points from morning cable news), but why does the solution have to come from D.C.? How exactly does putting an R, D, or I at the end of your name make you more qualified than someone who’s livelihood depends on it?
Honestly, I began to wonder why Health Insurance is any different than Homeowners, Renters, or Car insurance. They basically operate the same way; I pay a company money each month betting that something will happen to my house or I’ll get into an accident of some kind. They’re betting against me hoping that I’ll sail on by without any of those problems (deep down, so am I, honestly). But the main thing is, i found the company, I shopped around, I pay for it directly, and I can easily recall exactly how much these policies cost me. Now, why can’t I do that with Health insurance? Well, Mr. Bailey pretty much nails it:
Right now, thanks to incentives built into the tax code, patients are locked into the health plans their employers choose. Consequently, most of us don’t have a clue what our health insurance and health care cost. We have no way to reduce those costs and no incentive to do so even if we could. Worse yet, it’s precisely when you need the system the most that it fails you. In the words of the Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt, “when you’re down on your luck, you’re unemployed, you lose your insurance.…Only the devil could ever have invented such a system.”
See, the thing is, I don’t actually buy my health insurance; my company does. So I have no real way to shop around for other insurance companies and have them compete for my money. Not only that, but they’d have to limit any wrong-doing on their part knowing that at any time I could jump ship and go with a competitor.
Many government-proponents seem to think that if the health insurance industry was left to its own devices, it would end up being far worse than it is now. But seeing how they can spend millions of dollars buying legislation that favors them - not me, influencing regulations to give themselves an edge, and stifling competition to keep prices artificially high by their enforced monopoly, I honestly don’t see how it could be any worse.
I want to see them compete. I want them to fight themselves to come up with better rates. I want to see a hot, chipper, raven-haired woman on TV work in a metaphorical store and offer to compare rates of different health insurance companies in order to get at my money.
Unfortunately for me, 500 people in D.C. are easier to buy than 300 million are to compete for.
