Link of the Day [4.10.09]
The problem of universal health coverage is “[t]o mandate that everyone purchase health insurance, as many have suggested, would require that the government specify what constitutes adequate coverage — in other words, what health conditions an insurance policy would need to cover.”
So no need for universal health coverage, because then the government will tell us what medical coverage we can get, and we certainly don’t need the government controlling our health. And we certainly don’t need the government telling the free market on what it can cover. The free market will take care of everything.
With a free market system we can give tax breaks to people to seek their own coverage in the health insurance market, but we’ll need to adjust the market so that “state mandates that require insurers to cover certain conditions, which make it expensive to offer individual policies, could be removed.”
But that is the crux of the health insurance problem isn’t it?
Without universal coverage, insurers will decide on who to insure, and in the health insurance business you want to minimize what you spend so that you want to cover only the healthiest people out there. The healthy don’t go in for any costly treatments. Eliminating the need to cover certain conditions would eliminate those people with those conditions from ever being able to receive insurance, and it would give the health insurance industry cover as they drop all sick people from their plans.
That’s why we want universal coverage, so that no one, no matter their health gets insurance. The cost of scale should make it then cheap for everyone.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/opinion/09ponnuru.html
