Item — HN Reader

The status quo of health care definitely retards entrepreneurship. Increased taxes also retard entrepreneurship (in a historically well documented way, although maybe the effect between 15-23.8% isn't a well tested range).

I am not sure which has a larger effect here.

I definitely would like to see some health insurance changes, just not the ones in this bill, and not by taxing capital to pay for services to individuals. Actually reducing costs would be my #1 approach -- politically unpopular, but I'd be fine with subsidized or free basic care for everyone, but no free advanced care for those without private insurance. Private insurance purchased by individuals, with or without a tax deduction, and totally decoupled from employers.

1 comments

What's "advanced" care?

I sent you long email describing. Basically I'd like to see public subsidized or free health care at the NHS level (i.e. kind of crap, but good enough), with available free relatively-unregulated private insurance and private care. I figure it would cost $1-2k/person/yr for the public side (excluding old people in medicare, which is another huge problem), which is a lot less than is spent now covering marginally insured people, overhead of medicaid, etc. I'd get employers totally out of the insurance game.

This is politically unpopular (some people WILL get lower quality free care under this plan than they get today, and some people might get lower quality care than under employer-provided care, if they choose to spend the savings on something else like food or education, which might be rational!) Also, I think the US Government is possibly more incompetent in running healthcare (I work in DoD healthcare, so I see this firsthand...) than the UK or Canadians or French.

Your email was great. You should click "edit" on your post and paste the email over your comment. I'll do the same with mine.

In the meantime, my response was: a totally standard appendectomy for a friend of mine cost tens of thousands of dollars. That isn't a quality of care issue, it isn't a freak incident, it doesn't involve preventative care or externalities. Nobody is comfortable starting a company where they will be instantly bankrupt if their kid's appendix bursts.