A modest healthcare proposal

[bovlb]

After reading Milton Friedman's How to Cure Health Care ( h/t mijopo), I was musing on the following way to re-organize American healthcare.

• All healthcare (including prescriptions, dental, and vision) is paid for by the government at the point of treatment according to a schedule of payment rates (similar to Medicare).
• Healthcare payments per person are

Comments

[ashley_y]

The government has to come up with the difference for the $10K cap and the subsidies, so we need to know where that's coming from.

[bovlb]

Well, yes. We could always put tax rates back to the Reagan levels. Who could object to that?

[ashley_y]

Not me, I think this country is considerably under-taxed.

[mijopo]

I think this is a good improvement on the Friedman plan insofar as it retains most of the "market benefits" that make the Friedman plan more likely to be an acceptable compromise while addressing the question of the fate of the poor. Of course, that means it has also the disadvantage of being far more costly as a result. (It's reasonable to think that the Friedman plan might cost the government much more, and maybe far less insofar as it dumps Medicare and Medicaid.)

Re, update 2, I'd be more sanguine about using current insurance costs to help determine reasonable cap levels if we had good reason to think that most of the money would be redirected towards wages.

[mijopo]

s/might cost the/might not cost the/

Oops

[bovlb]

it retains most of the "market benefits" ... while addressing the question of the fate of the poor

Yes, that's what I was aiming for. It's important that the poor get free healthcare with a minimum of paperwork. That principle seems astoundingly absent from most proposals.

Re, update 2, I'd be more sanguine about using current insurance costs to help determine reasonable cap levels if we had good reason to think that most of the money would be redirected towards wages.

Good point. I'd hope we'd see future increased payments on employees go directly into wages, but it's naïve to expect that all employers will beneficently convert all current health insurance payments into wages.