This from today’s NYT — Stephen Colbert’s definitive judgment on President Bush’s health coverage proposal:
“It’s so simple. Most people who can’t afford health insurance also are too poor to owe taxes. But if you give them a deduction from the taxes they don’t owe, they can use the money they’re not getting back from what they haven’t given to buy the health care they can’t afford.”
Click here for the whole article, a well written argument in support of single payer, with one glaring exception:
Because moving to a single-payer system would make the economic pie bigger, it should be possible for everyone, including the insurance industry, to come out ahead.The first step is to acknowledge that insurance companies are not evil, that they invested in good faith under tax laws that favored employer-provided private health insurance. To put them out of business with an overnight switch would be unjust. Even so, they are not entitled to a permanent license to operate a system that has become economically unsustainable. The move to a single-payer plan would save far more than enough to compensate insurance companies for lost profits. Compensation for losses could start at 100 percent, then be gradually phased out as companies shifted investments elsewhere.
Hmmm. Can you imagine the legislative battle to finance losses for insurance companies?
in massachusetts, we are required to buy health insurance but ONLY from carriers with a “seal of approval.” see health connector
it’s not health care costs that are skyrocketing, it’s administrative costs. the many layers of clerks, secretaries, adjusters serve to artificially inflate overall costs
I think any investor in a company in a regulated industry (or any industry) has to factor in the chance of losses due to legislation/regulation. It comes with the territory.
That being said, has anyone studied a flavor of single-payer where the government supports (for lower-income people) the purchase of individual insurance or provides funding for a basic benefits package that individuals can add to with their own dollars (call it single payer/multi-carrier)
This might avoid the presumed downside of having a medicare-like program for all (monolithic product offering, susceptibility to lobbying, etc.) although it doesn’t eliminate the administrative overhead of private insurance…
I’d be interested in seeing citations of high-quality analysis of this idea…
Thanks for the heads up and link to NYT’s article!
No need to compensate insurance co’s for losses (now there’s a bizarre idea) but we do need to get them out of the way, so to speak. This very doable when we rally the political leadership and voter support for reforms to set wheels in motion that greatly increase participation in Medicare-plus type programs using single payer financing. This will result in steady attrition of private plan participation. To read about such a plan check out the Hacker proposal released by the Economic Policy Institute recently.