Why create an entity that our grandchildren and great grandchildren will have to pay for. Allowing business to join a public option will be death to the private insurance companies and then we are stuck with a canadian health care system. Scary stuff.

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How much do you know about the US healthcare system? I cannot claim that I even know 10% about its policies and history but I know enough to shed some light on your comments.

“I honestly cannot figure out what the purpose of a health care reform bill would be. Perhaps it would make a few tweaks to obscure policies and change some pointless regulations around, but it wouldn’t do what this nation’s health system desperately needs; it would not lower the cost of health insurance.”

The current state of our healthcare system was both caused and transformed by “pointless regulations,” and rewriting our flawed decision making throughout the evolution of US healthcare is exactly what needs to happen. For example, in 1954 (post-World War II) a small line of IRS tax code, that rode along with wage freeze legislation, created tax-free status on employee provided health benefits. Along with other factors, this one “pointless regulation” is exactly what drove the inflationary tendency of health care costs and thus the coverage of them by inherently providing a subsidy to those purchasing private insurance for healthcare through employers.

If you don’t want to listen to me, listen to someone much smarter than I:
http://www.hsph.harvard.edu/news/hphr/fall-2008/fall08baicker.html from a professor in Health Policy & Management at the Harvard School of Public Health.

One more thing, the healthcare industry may be tempting to model with classical economics as you mentioned, but the classical assumptions we make to model a market do not hold in healthcare. For example, we assume “perfect information” — think about the asymmetries of knowledge in a patient-physician relationship, or even a payor-provider relationship.

Furthermore, the Congressional Budget Office and other authorities in healthcare costing have actually shown that instituting a public option would drive up healthcare costs for the middle class. You like economics: think about scarce resource allocation. Currently in the US system we allocate healthcare resources on the individuals ability to pay, whether it be out of pocket, through insurance, or through a government-sponsored program. If legislation passes which extends the allocation base (including those who couldn’t pay) by subsidizing their entry, who has to provide that subsidy?

Lastly, you mentioned that the media is only concerned with two areas, one being the “public option.” I would like to point out that currently half of our healthcare spending (which is the third largest sector of our economy and heavily regulated in every aspect) goes through the government. Here’s your real paradox: how can the entity who has had its hands in ‘half’ of the problem claim to hold the solution?

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