• Collected Thoughts on Health Care Reform
• Could have been worse--Bob Dylan in America
• How I wonder what you are
• Extreme Prejudice
• There is No Dana, only Fool
• Saving by Spending
• Is Anyone Else Hungry?
• Chuck Norris And State Secession
• Gun fear
• Why legislators don't worry about Constitutionality
• Hoping for Failure
• Halting the Tea Party
• The Crisis of Credit Visualized
• Intellectualism vs gimmick
• "Stop talking about it."

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Collected Thoughts on Health Care Reform

Let's start with Steven Malanga on How Free Health Care Got So Expensive:

State government mandates and favorable tax treatment in Washington have so distorted the market for health insurance that a generation of Americans now look on medical coverage as something very different from other kinds of insurance that we buy. While we will pay several hundred bucks out of our own pockets to have a plumber come repair a leaky pipe, we'll balk at deductibles and a $50 co-pay for a doctor's visit. We've been schooled in this attitude by politicians who have mandated that health insurance do things that we'd never expect from other kinds of insurance, and by consumer advocates who will demand our legislators do something about a health insurance company that doesn't cover some optional procedure that has nothing to do with life and death.

Next, Charles Krauthammer on the promise of savings through universal preventative medicine:

The idea that prevention is somehow intrinsically economically different from treatment -- that treatment increases costs and prevention lowers them -- is simply nonsense.

If you instinctively think he's wrong, please read his article, and follow his links to the CBO.

Also, Robert Samuelson asks readers to "Just imagine what the health care debate would be like if it truly focused on controlling spending."

Incidentally, Samuelson's proposal to use vouchers to cut costs--"Medicare recipients would receive a fixed amount and shop for networks with the lowest cost and highest quality,"--steps directly into the larger conversation about the problem conservatives and libertarians have in fighting the expansion of government programs. A lot of people are afraid of being ripped off in the free market. They don't want to hear that they paid more than their friends for a plumber or auto mechanic or cell phone service. They don't want to compare plans, when they could just demand a "fair" plan that would apply to everybody. To some voters, the thought of a health care voucher is just a nightmare. They want to be able to go to a doctor when they are sick, without having to think about the cost. They want a mom, as noted on NPR's Morning Edition today.

Free market advocates just don't have a nuanced answer to that. We can keep telling people to grow up and take responsibility for themselves, but while we do that they'll keep voting for politicians who offer to take care of them. It is possible that there is no way out.