Non-Governmental Solutions to Health Care Problems

Viewpoint has an article titled A Better Way to Do Health Care Reform. It makes an excellent point about the relationship between high-deductible insurance policies and affordable health insurance. RLC links to another article at Reason, quotes from it and then adds this comment of his own:

As has been suggested by others, perhaps health insurance should be more like auto insurance. We expect our health insurance to cover everything from prescription drugs to doctor visits for the flu, but we don't expect such routine maintenance for our car to be covered by our auto insurance. We buy auto insurance in the case that we have a catastrophic accident, not to cover state inspections or to have a fuel pump replaced.

By placing the responsibility for purchasing insurance on the individual consumer rather than on employers the employee could be given the cost of their insurance otherwise withheld in their pay check, they would have portability since they wouldn't lose coverage if they switched jobs or lost their job, and employers would benefit by having more money available to them to hire more employees.

Ideas like this are at least worth looking into, but they're not going to be popular in Washington because they wouldn't allow the government camel to get its nose inside the tent of our health care.

The last paragraph gets to the heart of the problem. The high cost of health care is viewed on the left as an opportunity to enable the federal govvernment to regulate and control our health care system. There are better approaches which both keep down costs while retaining the advantages our system affords.