Insurance is no answer by John Stossel
The Bear on Jul 15 2009 at 8:01 am | Filed under: Health Care
Health care “reformers” keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they talk about cutting costs. This is contradictory nonsense.
What holds costs down is patients acting like consumers, looking out for themselves in a competitive market. Providers fight to win business by keeping costs down and quality up.
Yet politicians keep telling us the solution is more insurance. And they mean insurance not just for catastrophic diseases that could bankrupt us but also for routine treatments.
The politicians are so oblivious to reality that they are on course to make things worse. Obama would force every business to either give workers health insurance or pay a fine into the public system. Why is that something we should want employers to do? Premiums come out of our salaries, but insurers are accountable to our bosses, not to us.
Why not just have a free market where people can buy whatever kind of health insurance they want? Competition would then bring prices down.
Obama and his Senate allies would limit competition by requiring insurers to cover everyone for the same “fair” price. No “cherry picking,” the president says. No charging healthy people less.
They call this “community rating,” and it sounds fair. No more cruel “discrimination” against people who have a preexisting condition, obese people or smokers. But such simple-minded one-size-fits-all rules take from insurance companies their best price-dampening tool: Risk-based pricing encourages people to take better care of themselves, just as car-insurance companies reward good drivers. With one-size pricing your car-insurance company must give the town drunk the same deal it gives you.
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