Armstrong: Pay your own doctors

The October 1, 2009 Colorado Daily has published Ari Armstrong's latest OpEd, "Pay Your Own Doctor". Here's an excerpt:

While Barack Obama pretends that insurance companies are at fault, the reality is that federal tax distortions drove insurance into the expensive, non-portable, employer-paid system. This tax distortion explains why Americans tend to use insurance as pre-paid health care, rather than to cover unexpected, high-cost treatments.

Even as Obama demonizes the insurance companies that federal policies have coddled and favored, his policies expand political favoritism. Obama wants to force you to buy politically controlled insurance, on penalty of huge fines.

If you want to control your health care, you should advocate free- market reforms that expand medical competition, not more political controls. The experiences my wife and I have had with a Health Savings Account (HSA) and high-deductible insurance illustrate the benefits...

(Read the full text of "Pay Your Own Doctor". His piece also appears in the October 2, 2009 Denver Daily News under the title, "Health and the empowerment of payment".)