Follow-on to “Bringing the Failures of Canada to the Golden Stateâ€Â
The Gentle Cricket posted the first in a series on California state bill SB840, which (by his reading) would bring all Cali health care under government control. I suggest that you read his post, since he is clearly invested in studying the bill and its promoters. An excerpt:
All federal, state and county monies currently spent on health care will be reallocated to the state Health Care Fund. This will supply about one-third of the needed funding. [...] The remaining funding will come from state health taxes that will replace health insurance premiums now paid to insurance companies and co-pays and deductibles now paid to providers. Premiums will be affordable for every Californian and every business because what families pay is in proportion to their income and what employers pay is in proportion to wages
Oy! Doesn’t that sound a lot like the old Karl Marx quote, “From each, according to his ability, to each, according to his needsâ€Â? Talk about repeating history…
The problem with socialized health care is that there is no relationship between what one pays and what one receives. Further, like any tax, the rich pay for more than they receive, and the poor pay much less, which makes for a two-tiered society — if the rich folks decide to stay, that is.
(If you think your insurance company is bureaucratic, imagine if health care were run by those who run the DMV!)
Kidding aside, this bill would be tragic. The hope that spending would somehow be manageable flies in the face of logic and history. The only way for health care to be both widely available and generally equitable is to have those who receive treatment be responsible for buying it. Vacuuming and redistributing all health care dollars through “the system†is the opposite of this.
Our private insurance system exists to mitigate risks. It has a great incentive to understand and quantify these risks, and does a reasonably good job when it is free to operate. An unencumbered insurance system allows us to transform health care from unmanageably expensive to manageably expensive.
And that’s the point: health care is very expensive. This is largely due to advances in medicine and our moral premise that no cost is too great when saving lives.
Given this combination, putting spending in the hands of bureaucrats means that there is almost no incentive to control costs. By any estimate, such a system would be economically catastrophic as health care, in the form of taxes, engulfs the economy.
I don’t have a silver bullet here, but the basis of any policy must be that individuals are responsible for their own health care expenses. Insurance companies, with a profit motive, can manage risk and negotiate prices on behalf of individuals, as they do now.
Let’s fix the actual problems, perhaps by mandating that citizens buy private coverage (that Mitt Romney guy again!), and giving insurance companies more freedom to compete. Let’s not pretend that there is a free lunch.
UPDATE: Jane Galt outlines the criteria and a first-pass, elegant solution. Great reading.
Cross-posted at The Only Republican in San Francisco
March 28th, 2006 at 8:25 am
Gentle Cricket on socialized health care for Cali
The Gentle Cricket has posted the first in a series on California state bill SB840, which (by his reading) would bring all Cali health care under government control. I suggest that you read his post, since he is clearly invested
May 15th, 2006 at 12:21 pm
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