All These Health Care Plans Are Confusing
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| Also listed in: Campus Progress Blog |
Every couple of months, a presidential candidate comes up with a new proposal for how they plan to solve the health care crisis -- 46.5 million Americans are uninsured. The 18-34 age group makes up the largest percentage --39 percent -- of the total uninsured. So even if you're currently covered under some kind of student health care plan, that coverage will evaporate the day you graduate. That's why you should care about what the candidates say about health insurance.
The only problem is, health care plans are confusing. One way to get around this is to look at health08.org and look at their side-by-side comparison tool for what each candidate is proposing.
All about drugging you, not so much about prevention. For example, it's been pretty concretely established that physical exercise is every bit as likely to lift you out of a depression as Paxil or Zoloft. (As Bill Maher put it commenting on the study, "Ask your doctor if getting up off your ass is right for you!")
Real societal health care is about preventative care first and pharmaceutical solutions to perceived problems a distant second.
So far, color me underwhelmed by the proposals the candidates have made.
This is too simple by half. Health care, when left alone, is subject to serious market failures. Hell, look back to the golden age of relatively unregulated health care, where fraternal orders contracted with general practitioners and built their own hospitals, dispensed care, etc. The AMA successfully lobbied to shut out that competition with steep regulations.
What you need is an equilibrium. You're living in fantasy-land if you think the HMOs, the pharmaceutical industry, or the elderly are all going to stop lobbying Congress just because you've decided that it's best to let the market take its course. Not to mention the fact that the provision of health care actually involves serious market failures where there's a legitimate role for government to play regardless.
Neither a purely public nor a purely private approach would be desirable for providing Americans with health care.
The best plans are those that get government involved in ways that preserve incentives that cause both consumers and providers of health care to behave more efficiently.
As someone who works in DC and knows plenty of crass, cynical Beltway types on both sides of the aisle - You're either naive or slow if you think that "leaving it up to the market" is even a remotely possible option. Even in your alternate universe where progressives back out of lobbying the federal government on health care, nobody else will.
In fact, it'd be practically a crime if they did -- corporations are bound legally to pursue the interests of their shareholders, and it's pretty obvious that lobbying congress has been very good for them.
How is this a market failure? Sounds like the market was working fine, until government regulations were introduced by people who were upset with having to compete in the market.