Friday, January 10, 2014

Rethinking Health Insurance

Schultz, Atlas, and Cogan have a nice piece in the LA Times, "It's time to rethink health insurance".

Their basic takehome point is that, "Rather than using insurance to subsidize the consumption of all medical care, Americans should use it only for catastrophic expenses."

They also include some good concrete suggestions that would move us in the right direction.

(Note: I think "public financing" of health care should be eventually phased out.  But in our current political climate, that won't happen immediately.  For now, a helpful intermediate goal would be to make any such public financing as clear as possible, as opposed to being hidden in various insurance subsidies, so that taxpayers footing the bill can properly discuss and debate the scope of such financing.)