Whitslack

Dropping the Bomb on Healthcare

I'm shocked at how badly everyone here seems to be missing a key point.

OF COURSE you cannot trust insurance companies or hospitals to police themselves or to reign in costs by themselves. But that's true of any big business. Corporations exist to generate maximum profits for their shareholders.

The key factor that everyone here seems to be overlooking is the market. Corporations don't police themselves; their customers do! The problem is that we the people are not the customers of the insurance companies; our employers are. And our employers are purchasing services from the insurers not with *their* money, as it might seem on the surface, but with *our* money. (They could afford to pay us higher wages if the insurance premiums decreased, and they would. They budget a certain amount for each employee, and it makes no difference to them how big a fraction of that amount goes to insurance and how small a fraction goes to the employee.) And as we know from observing Congress, whenever someone spends someone else's money, they have no interest in seeking out the best price/quality ratio; they just buy whatever is easiest.

So, if the problem is that we the people are not the customers of the insurance companies but our money is being handed over to them by our employers, then how did this problem arise and how do we fix it? The problem was, unsurprisingly, created by Congress: there is currently an artificial, non-market preference for health care rather than wages, which exists because health care benefits are not taxed as income. Thus, the current system greatly favors health care purchased by the employer and not by the employee.

How do we fix the problem? Make the employee the customer again. We are customers in the auto insurance industry, and we see commercials on TV all the time begging us to switch car insurance because we'll save so much money. Have you ever seen a commercial begging you to switch health insurance? Think about that.

National Health Insurance, 'Cap and Trade': Two Steps in the Wrong Direction

Peter Schiff does it again. This article covers THREE concepts that I often bring up in conversation with government teat suckers:

• Government-run "businesses" can operate at a loss indefinitely because their losses will always be subsidized by taxpayers held at gunpoint. What private business, which actually has to break even just to continue operating, stands a chance of competing with that? Extortion is illegal, unless the government is doing it.

• So-called health "insurance" is not really insurance at all but more of a prepaid health service plan. There is no incentive for one to curtail consumption or minimize waste when a given procedure will be covered whether one obtains it from an emergency room that charges $700 or from a walk-in clinic that charges $300.

• The correct solution to rising health care costs is to get *market forces* acting on them again. This means putting consumers back in the driver's seat so they will, in due course of serving their own self-interest, seek out the best quality service for the lowest price. The reason health care is broken is because the forces that make capitalism work have been artificially shunted and distorted by tax policy.