Comments on: Private health insurance?

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 02:02:00 +0000

It may be enlightening to look back to the 1920s. One of the main reasons Americans spend as much on health care as we do is that we can, and that we want the goods and services. The poorest quintile in the US, if memory serves, are now 5 times better off in real terms than the comparable cohort of the early 20th Century. Even accounting for the inflated cost of medical care, the poorest American is far better off now than the average American was then.

We talk about the problem being cost, the problem being the government, and so on. I believe the seminal discussion, if we do intend to arrive at a market solution we can live with, must center on the single biggest obstacle: egalitarianism. If it is not socially and politically acceptable to come right out and say that those of lesser means will not receive the same medical care as those of the highest means, then the government will ultimately step in and arbitrarily determine the allocation of resources.

This is not to say that the poor and near-poor would not receive quality care — they would. But if insurers and providers are not permitted to develop solutions that make basic care and basic insurance affordable, and if they are not permitted to deny the most expensive treatments to some policyholders and not others, the market will be hamstrung. As government intervenes, there will be winners and losers, not determined by impersonal market forces but by arbitrary standards.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:54:00 +0000

Well… I suppose if you think the government isn’t doing enough then government is the solution – but that’s a really odd sounding problem to me.

I’m talking about real problems too – not imaginary non-sensical problems.

“Market failure” is an unfortunate and odd monicker, but I see no reason to stop talking about it as a concept (and using the label that we’ve inherited for that concept). There’s no point in using only an over-simplified concept of the market that doesn’t really exist to understand the world. If there are problems with who holds relevant information, then no – the market hasn’t “failed”. But it works differently and it’s not a bad thing to think about that. If producers aren’t incorporating all costs of course the market hasn’t “failed”, but it works differently and it’s worth considering the implications.

I hope you aren’t mistaking my use of a common term that I didn’t come up with as me thinking that markets literally “failed”. It’s just a label for a phenomenon, russnelson. We can coin a new one here, though, if that’s troubling for you.

By: Health care vs. health insurance

Health care vs. health insurance — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 12:12:41 +0000

[...] this post, I asked you to respond to this question I received from a reader, Tom: Imagine we had entirely [...]

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 03:01:00 +0000

If true, it was probably because no company would bother (or was legally allowed) to charge the kind of premiums commensurate with their degree of risk. If they did, people like you would claim they were preying on the elderly.

You need to stop and think about what insurance really is–a product, a hedge–and what is not–charity, financing.

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 02:43:00 +0000

“But it does not mean you have the right to “associate with others” the way an armed robber “associates” with his victims.”

In short, a consistent set of rights cannot include the right to violate rights.