By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--August 19, 2015
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It’s clear that we need to provide the American people with more options for how they get the health care they need, and we need to make those options more affordable. My plan would take the following steps to provide the American people with the health care options they need at prices they can afford:
- Repeal ObamaCare in its entirety.
- Ensure affordable and accessible health insurance for everyone.
- Make health care more efficient, effective and accountable by empowering the states.
- Increase quality and choice through innovation.
- Provide financial stability for families and taxpayers.
The basic tradeoff involved is in the comprehensiveness of that coverage. Obamacare is built around a highly prescriptive definition of coverage, which doesn’t allow something to be called insurance if it just provides protection against serious financial risk rather than effectively pre-paying for a large amount of routine care. Some on the Left have long argued that insurance that only kicks in to cover significant costs (as insurance does in other realms) can’t really count as health insurance, since it wouldn’t allow for the sort of routine care essential to maintaining health. This difference about what health insurance is has actually been essential to the Left-Right divide on health care, though it hasn’t always gotten the attention it deserves. Liberals have increasingly been willing to acknowledge the growing evidence (though there has long been a lot of evidence) that insurance doesn’t improve health very much but rather provides much-needed financial security, but they have yet to allow this to reshape their basic view of what insurance ought to look like and what is really essential about it. Proposals like the one Walker put forth today are built on an answer to that question: everyone could afford at least catastrophic coverage if they wanted it, and beyond that there would be a competitive market in additional coverage and care. Meanwhile, Obamacare, because of the narrow space it provides for varying insurance design, has been yielding a lot of insurance products that look like upside-down insurance: very high out of pocket costs (often higher than what a pre-Obamacare catastrophic plan would have involved) coupled with extensive minimum coverage requirements, so that routine care is covered by insurance but unexpected calamities create financial disasters. Not surprisingly, such products turn out to be pretty unattractive. Flipping that model around would make for much more sensible insurance.Walker's proposal and Levin's commentary address what has long been the problem with health insurance in this country. Unlike, say, auto insurance - which you rely on only for major costs you can't handle yourself - health insurance has become a crutch that people expect to pay for everything. Almost everyone can handle $100 for a doctor's office visit, but in the age of Big Health Insurance, people go absolutely nuts if they're expected to pay anything more than a $10 co-pay. They're programmed to think the cost of basic health care is not their responsibility. And with the removal of all patient connection to prices, costs soar. Walker's plan would turn that back in the other direction, and he's thought through the transition very nicely too. It's a good plan. I hope more Republican candidates offer similar plans of their own because we should be talking about how (not whether) to replace ObamaCare. If Americans really understood health care economics, they would be clamoring for something like this.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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