Are you over-insured in health insurance terms? Do you feel like you should be spending more out of pocket? If you say yes to both questions, then you and President Bush agree about what’s wrong with the nation’s health care system.
“When you go buy a car you’re able to shop and compare,” says President Bush. “And yet in health care that’s just not happening in America today.”
Is figuring out which cancer test to take like buying a car? Figuring out whether to get that headache checked?
What planet does President Bush live on exactly?
Functioning markets are wonderful thing. Our whole economic system is based on them. But any serious student of markets understands that to function they require at least a threshold level of informed and rational actors. Neither is really the case on the consumer end of the health care market.
That sets aside the question of the moral equities involved in placing more price pressures on individuals as they choose the quality of health care they get for their families. And it entirely ignores the really straightforward point that isolating health care purchasing to individuals pretty much guarantees that the cost to the individual is much higher.
This is bad policy and bad politics. The president’s opposition would do well by their country to attack him on every point.
