Health care and health insurance are not the same thing.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet our increasingly contentious public debate is largely addressing these issues as if they are, and that is a chief source of problems with our resulting public policy prescriptions.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m going to define health \u201ccare\u201d as all of the things we do (or should do) to take care of ourselves in a planned fashion.\u00a0\u00a0 Things like annual physicals, eating well, getting exercise, taking our prescription medications, and so on.\u00a0\u00a0 Taking personal responsibility for these things reduces the risk that we will have a physically devastating event down the road.\u00a0\u00a0 But to protect ourselves from financial devastation, health \u201cinsurance\u201d is entirely appropriate.<\/p>\n
Notice that in the case of health \u201ccare\u201d the actions we take have (or should have) a high probability of happening.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet in the case of a medical catastrophe (heart attack, long term disability, etc.), we all hope that the probability of that happening is very low.<\/p>\n
Because of the probabilities, insurance should play an important role in the latter, but has no place in the former, with one exception:\u00a0 an insurer would likely be willing to lower their price if they were assured that the buyer was taking \u201ccare\u201d of themselves \u2013 because the risk of them having to pay would be lower.\u00a0\u00a0 Other than that aspect, why should an insurance company be involved in what doctor I want to see, and what services they will provide to me, and what that will cost?\u00a0 Why shouldn\u2019t \u201ccare providers\u201d be free to advertise and compete for their customers like the sellers of any other product?\u00a0 \u00a0And for that matter, why heavily regulate insurance companies and hamstring them from providing a whole host of products at different levels of service and pricing?<\/p>\n
Health Savings Accounts are the answer.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Very simply, the annual money that would typically purchase a family insurance policy is split into two parts:\u00a0 one part is placed into an account to be spent on \u201ccare\u201d and the other part purchases \u201ccatastrophic insurance\u201d.\u00a0 The account holder spends money in the account with no external interference or paperwork, but sleeps well knowing that if a huge expense comes up, they are fully covered. \u00a0Most notably, they keep any unspent money that accumulates in the account. \u00a0Consumers now have every incentive to be fully informed and involved in their purchases, and health costs drop from the service provider competition that ensues.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Health care and health insurance are not the same thing.\u00a0\u00a0 Yet our increasingly contentious public debate is largely addressing these issues as if they are, and that is a chief source of problems with our resulting public policy prescriptions. I\u2019m going to define health \u201ccare\u201d as all of the things we do (or should do) […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1\/revisions\/47"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/civilsocietytrust.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}