Straight talk on health-care

From QandO:

Because of various government intereferences, more than 1/3 of all health care spending is purely administrative. By contrast, Canada’s administrative burden on health care funding is about 1%. If we were to switch over to a single payer system, there is an excellent chance that we would, in fact, spend less money on health care than we currently do.

This doesn't address the prospect of decreased innovation in the cheaper single-payer system. But his prescriptions for reform are nonetheless good:

[..] there is a fundamental problem with our current debate. We are arguing over whether we should keep the system we have, or move to a system that sets us on the path to a single-payer system. But those aren’t the only alternatives. There is another option that is being lost in this debate. The Democrats don’t want to mention it for ideological reasons. The Republicans don’t mention it because of…well…incompetent buffoonery, I guess.

The alternative, of course, is to make the case that our current system costs so much, and is so distorted, because of government interference. We have a mixed system of health care funding in which the government’s intervention imposes a wide range of unnecessary costs. So our choice is not to keep what we have, or eliminate the administrative overhead by turning it all over to the government. The third choice is to return to a free market in health care.

Eliminate state by state coverage mandates, which result in 50 different–and sometimes wildly so–regulatory regimes. Eliminate federal and state laws that prevent insurers from creating nationwide plans and risk pools. Eliminate employer health-care coverage, and personalize it, to make it personal and portable.

Here’s another idea: allow people to buy health insurance. That isn’t what we have now. We have pre-paid health care. The two things are wildly different. For example, look at how auto insurance works. Imagine how much your car insurance would cost if we expected our insurance to cover 80% of the cost of oil changes, tire rotation, wiper blades, new tires, regular service, etc. But that’s precisely what we expect medical insurance to do. And then we wonder why it costs so darn much.

We need to allow insurers to offer simple catastrophic care coverage, with varying deductibles. That way, you can pick up the tab for your own doctor’s visits, but you don’t have to worry about bankrupting yourself if some idiot runs a stop sign and knocks you off of your motorcycle. We need to allow anyone who wants to set up a medical savings account. Heck, if we really want “the government” to finance it, we could offer a 100% tax credit for health care expenditures.