There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market
This is easy to refute.
Flash back 100 years. People had healthcare they received from a family doctor. Insurance was non-existent, and the free market reigned.
In fact, it was the success of the free market in healthcare that led -- and continues to lead -- for more and more complicated, expensive treatments that save more and more lives.
I see three problems with markets and healthcare:
1) Insurance policies are so obfuscated that nobody understands what they are buying. Government needs to step in here and create standard insurance policy baselines. This will allow me to make an informed decision.
2) The people receiving healthcare have little or no input into cost control -- the people controlling costs have no "skin in the game" when it comes to value and quality of care. This decoupling needs to be fixed to encourage individuals to monitor and control their own costs.
3) If society has a greater interest in making sure there is a basic level of healthcare for all, as it does with say automotive insurance, then it should be a law for all people to have personal health insurance that covers these catastrophic scenarios. This would also mean allowing all insurance to be tax deductable and decoupling insurance completely from employers. It should be completely portable and associated just with the person.
Compared to some of the huge plans I've seen, these are really easy to describe. A bill could be just a couple of pages, and most Americans could understand exactly what is being passed. Instead of trying to have one huge law "fix" the problem, it simply provides some definitions and takes one huge problem and breaks it up into hundreds of millions of little problems that can be solved various ways.
Why we continue to think that some legislative body can create gargantuan one-size-fits-all solutions is beyond me. Evolution, machine learning, market theory, chaos -- lots of real, hard science says that solutions are iterative, incremental, and adaptive. Not complex and static.
I have a hard time figuring out how an individual healthcare consumer would have any rational reason to "monitor and control their own costs"? If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.
There's no point at which the average person with a reasonable prognosis for even 1 more year of life says "gee, that sounds expensive, perhaps I should just die instead, so as to control my own cost to society [or my insurance company]."
I would suggest that insurance policies be required to send a certain amount back to the purchaser each year in the form of a check -- say 20% of premiums. The total amount would be reduced by the amount of services used that year.
If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.
I completely agree that if you have a life-threatening illness cost is not an option. But as a healthy young-person, when I get a cold or something I just take some aspirin and wait to get better. Same goes for ear infections. There is a lot of room for flex in how people get treatment for non-life-threatening illnesses. What the stats show is that the less skin in the game people have, the more likely they are to go to the emergency room for things like common colds.
Comments
There are, however, no examples of successful health care based on the principles of the free market
This is easy to refute.
Flash back 100 years. People had healthcare they received from a family doctor. Insurance was non-existent, and the free market reigned.
In fact, it was the success of the free market in healthcare that led -- and continues to lead -- for more and more complicated, expensive treatments that save more and more lives.
I see three problems with markets and healthcare:
1) Insurance policies are so obfuscated that nobody understands what they are buying. Government needs to step in here and create standard insurance policy baselines. This will allow me to make an informed decision.
2) The people receiving healthcare have little or no input into cost control -- the people controlling costs have no "skin in the game" when it comes to value and quality of care. This decoupling needs to be fixed to encourage individuals to monitor and control their own costs.
3) If society has a greater interest in making sure there is a basic level of healthcare for all, as it does with say automotive insurance, then it should be a law for all people to have personal health insurance that covers these catastrophic scenarios. This would also mean allowing all insurance to be tax deductable and decoupling insurance completely from employers. It should be completely portable and associated just with the person.
Compared to some of the huge plans I've seen, these are really easy to describe. A bill could be just a couple of pages, and most Americans could understand exactly what is being passed. Instead of trying to have one huge law "fix" the problem, it simply provides some definitions and takes one huge problem and breaks it up into hundreds of millions of little problems that can be solved various ways.
Why we continue to think that some legislative body can create gargantuan one-size-fits-all solutions is beyond me. Evolution, machine learning, market theory, chaos -- lots of real, hard science says that solutions are iterative, incremental, and adaptive. Not complex and static.
I have a hard time figuring out how an individual healthcare consumer would have any rational reason to "monitor and control their own costs"? If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.
There's no point at which the average person with a reasonable prognosis for even 1 more year of life says "gee, that sounds expensive, perhaps I should just die instead, so as to control my own cost to society [or my insurance company]."
I would suggest that insurance policies be required to send a certain amount back to the purchaser each year in the form of a check -- say 20% of premiums. The total amount would be reduced by the amount of services used that year.
If I'm sick, I want to be made better. If I have cancer, I want it cured, etc.
I completely agree that if you have a life-threatening illness cost is not an option. But as a healthy young-person, when I get a cold or something I just take some aspirin and wait to get better. Same goes for ear infections. There is a lot of room for flex in how people get treatment for non-life-threatening illnesses. What the stats show is that the less skin in the game people have, the more likely they are to go to the emergency room for things like common colds.