The Issues
Health Care
Health care in the United States is among the best in the world, but
practically nobody likes the system. Our private insurance system is
incomprehensible. Our public systems - accounting for fully half of
healthcare spending - are expensive, restrictive, inefficient and unfair.
As a result of IRS rules, dating from WWII wage-and-price controls,
exempting employer-paid insurance from income tax, many people even make
job decisions based on the availability of health insurance.
Some have used this discontent to push for even greater government
interference in the system. Calls for mandates, single-payer insurance,
even socialized medicine, have become commonplace. The Governor's 208
Commission was stacked with members pre-disposed to further state
intervention. The Commission rejected the one free-market proposal
presented to it.
In addition, insurance is expensive because we're over-insured. If
we bought car insurance like we buy health insurance, we'd have coverage
for oil changes, and all have special truck-bed insurance, even for our
sub-compacts. Typical health insurance cover routine needs that, for the
most part, we could easily afford. And we are required to buy services
that we will likely never use.
The government is simply not capable of determining what insurance best
fits each of us. We are.
And for these services, we're not spending our own money. We see
absolutely no monetary benefit from making smart consumerist choices in our
health care. Therefore, there is no incentive for us to save money.
Thanks to services like WebMD, we are increasingly consumerist when it
comes to our treatment; there is no good reason why we can't adopt similar
consumerist attitudes when it comes to payment.
The problems with our health care system stem not from too many market
forces, but from too little. The solutions to our health care lie in
re-introducing market forces.
Health Savings Accounts, combined with high-deductible catastophic
insurance, provide the most efficient, most affordable combination of
coverages.
While Medicare and prescription drug reform will have to wait for Federal
action, there is much we can do at the state level to make insurance and
care more affordable for and resposive to our citizens.
We can:
- Change Colorado's Medicaid to more closely resemble HSAs, along the
lines of South Carolina's reform;
- Encourage the use of Health Savings Accounts;
- Allow Coloradoans to buy out-of-state health insurance plans to
encourage competition;
- Remove restrictions on walk-in clinics to allow Target, Costco,
Wal-Mart to provide affordable basic medical care;
- Require hospitals and clinics to make outcome data available for
informed consumer comparison.
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