Are We Heading Toward Socialized Medicine? (Part Two)
---
Homeowners insurance is a truly private market. Anyone screeching about a "homeowners insurance crisis"?
Auto insurance is not quite a truly private market, but it's light-years beyond health insurance. People may grumble about their car insurance, but at least it's a competitive industry (just ask Dennis Haysbert, or the gecko) where people can switch carriers with relative ease and choose from a variety of options that best suits their individual needs.*
The only people who have anything remotely similar to "private health insurance," meanwhile, are the self-employed. They too are affected by the tax code (which is why they are not part of the "5%" the Urban Institute mentions), but at least they enjoy the flexibility to make their own insurance decisions and comparison shop for coverage that they most prefer.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a financial disaster in which the working poor pay the health care costs of the retired rich — this incidentally somehow constitutes being "progressive." The truly enlightened approach — taxpayers providing basic health care to the incompetent and indigent as part of a humane social safety net — is already in place via Medicaid (assisted by not-for-profit institutions and private charity). To the extent that Medicaid is not covering everyone and everything it should, then let's expand it (unlike the Democrats' recent despicable SCHIP fraud, expanding Medicaid would not send most libertarians to the barricades). If most libertarians, provided with persuasive evidence of its propriety, would be okay with simply expanding Medicaid, then why is it such an abominable concept for the "socially concerned" radical left (whom, recall, universally insist that "compassionate libertarianism" is an oxymoron)?
One way or the other, let's not pretend that there is a universal "right to suck at the taxpayer teat" cloaked as a "right to health care." And let's certainly not pretend that the current system is a "private market" or that its shortcomings are a "market failure."
---
*Note, however, the insolent lie that health care socialists use about how "we mandate that people have auto insurance." What "we" mandate in most states is that people have liability coverage, to prevent innocent third parties from incurring the costs of a motorist's negligence. But private health insurance is not analogous to liability coverage — it's analogous to collision coverage: insulating you from your own costs, not someone else's. I am not aware of any jurisdiction that requires motorists to carry collision coverage. In that sense — the only sense that matters — auto insurance is indeed a "truly private market." (As for the follow-up lie that health insurance is indeed analogous to liability coverage, because "we all pay for the uninsured" — see this post.)
Note also that "auto insurance" does not cover routine maintenance, and certainly not gas & tolls. Yet what we call "health care insurance" — which as Arnold Kling has noted is really "health cost insulation" — does include routine (and perhaps not so routine) "maintenance" expenses such as annual physicals, flu shots and disease tests. This removal of direct payment for direct service is yet another reason why health care expenses are rising disproportionately and why the current system is hardly a "truly private market."
Auto insurance is not quite a truly private market, but it's light-years beyond health insurance. People may grumble about their car insurance, but at least it's a competitive industry (just ask Dennis Haysbert, or the gecko) where people can switch carriers with relative ease and choose from a variety of options that best suits their individual needs.*
The only people who have anything remotely similar to "private health insurance," meanwhile, are the self-employed. They too are affected by the tax code (which is why they are not part of the "5%" the Urban Institute mentions), but at least they enjoy the flexibility to make their own insurance decisions and comparison shop for coverage that they most prefer.
Medicare, on the other hand, is a financial disaster in which the working poor pay the health care costs of the retired rich — this incidentally somehow constitutes being "progressive." The truly enlightened approach — taxpayers providing basic health care to the incompetent and indigent as part of a humane social safety net — is already in place via Medicaid (assisted by not-for-profit institutions and private charity). To the extent that Medicaid is not covering everyone and everything it should, then let's expand it (unlike the Democrats' recent despicable SCHIP fraud, expanding Medicaid would not send most libertarians to the barricades). If most libertarians, provided with persuasive evidence of its propriety, would be okay with simply expanding Medicaid, then why is it such an abominable concept for the "socially concerned" radical left (whom, recall, universally insist that "compassionate libertarianism" is an oxymoron)?
One way or the other, let's not pretend that there is a universal "right to suck at the taxpayer teat" cloaked as a "right to health care." And let's certainly not pretend that the current system is a "private market" or that its shortcomings are a "market failure."
---
*Note, however, the insolent lie that health care socialists use about how "we mandate that people have auto insurance." What "we" mandate in most states is that people have liability coverage, to prevent innocent third parties from incurring the costs of a motorist's negligence. But private health insurance is not analogous to liability coverage — it's analogous to collision coverage: insulating you from your own costs, not someone else's. I am not aware of any jurisdiction that requires motorists to carry collision coverage. In that sense — the only sense that matters — auto insurance is indeed a "truly private market." (As for the follow-up lie that health insurance is indeed analogous to liability coverage, because "we all pay for the uninsured" — see this post.)
Note also that "auto insurance" does not cover routine maintenance, and certainly not gas & tolls. Yet what we call "health care insurance" — which as Arnold Kling has noted is really "health cost insulation" — does include routine (and perhaps not so routine) "maintenance" expenses such as annual physicals, flu shots and disease tests. This removal of direct payment for direct service is yet another reason why health care expenses are rising disproportionately and why the current system is hardly a "truly private market."
Related Posts (on one page):
- Are We Heading Toward Socialized Medicine? (Part Two)
- Are We Heading Toward Socialized Medicine? (Part One)
- Socialized Medicine: What's In a Name? Or a Dichotomy?
- Socialized Medicine: On Health Insurance Profits
Posted by Kip on
18 April 2008
To comment on this post, please visit the new blogsite.