Cochrane on Health
[H]ealth insurance should and can be individual, portable, life-long, guaranteed-renewable, transferrable, competitive, and lightly regulated, mostly to ensure that companies keep their contractual promises. “Guaranteed renewable” means that your premiums do not increase and you can’t be dropped if you get sick. “Transferable” gives you the right to change insurance companies, increasing competition.
Entire essay worth reading.
Health risks naturally rise as people age. Part of this is the natural progression of the aging process; while part is the result of poor lifestyle choices. Regardless of why expected costs rise, premiums should be risk rated to reflect lifestyle and age. Health coverage can be Personal & Portable, but still actuarial fair. People should put aside funds into their HSA while young that can be used to offset (and subsidize) higher costs when old. A health insurance market where young, healthy people are expected to overpay in order to cross-subsidize older, less healthy people is not a stable marketplace.
Oh, like pre-ObamaCare individually owned policies in states with reasonable health insurance regulation?
“individual, portable, life-long, guaranteed-renewable, transferrable, competitive, and lightly regulated”
– these sound like appropriate measures to bring down healthcare costs.
It all sounds good, we just need to find a way to get it.
A succinct and excellent way of summarizing it. I will have to read this later at home.
very interesting
Yes yes yes yes yes. But we would still have a third party payer system and the problems that brings.
I agree with Cochrane. So much damage has been done by all these regulations that just solving the health insurance issue is not going to cut it. Perhaps that would be a good start though…Slowly but surely.
Very interesting. Privatize and innovate, go figure.