Minor Thoughts

If I was going to sum up my political philosophy as succinctly as possible, I think this is how I’d do it.

Perhaps the difference that most fundamentally separates true liberals and libertarians from others is that, to one degree or another, true liberals and libertarians are, unlike non-liberals and non-libertarians, dutiful sons and …

Congratulations, you’re Medicaid eligible! You now have health insurance. What’s that? You actually wanted health care? Oh, well, that’s something different. Why didn’t you say so?

Children with Medicaid are far more likely than those with private insurance to be turned away by medical specialists or be made to wait more than a month …

Middle-class families need health insurance to protect themselves from the financial devastation of a catastrophic illness. But many (arguably, almost all) of the most serious defects of the health care system are created by third-party payment of medical bills.

Insurer’s Gone Wild

”We allow the insurance industry to run wild in this country,” President Obama declared on Monday. ”We can’t have a system that works better for the insurance companies than it does for the American people.”

Yet Obama’s plan to tame health insurers would boost their business, protect them …

At the request of BlueCross BlueShield, Oliver Wyman did a study of the Senate health care bill. Unsurprisingly, this study estimates that the bill will cost consumers quite a bit more than the CBO estimated.

John Goodman summarized the findings this way:

Premiums for individuals and families purchasing coverage on their own will go up …

This morning I saw a new Facebook poll: ”Is Health Care a Human Right?”. I voted no.

Do you have a right to health care? Yes. And no. My answer ultimately depends on what you mean by a ”right” to health care.

Rights come in two varieties: negative and positive. A negative right can be thought of …

Here’s Warren Meyer, talking about the different types of rationing.

So here is what it boils down to: For every product or service purchase, someone makes a price-value trade-off to determine if that product or service should be purchased for a given price in that particular instance.

One option for …

The National Center for Policy Analysis published a press release from the HealthPlanWire today, showing the grow in private insurance world wide.

HPW follows health insurance markets globally, and is projecting that total covered lives will exceed one billion by 2012. Single-payer systems are declining world-wide because they are primarily based in countries which …

I should know by now that whenever I try to explain something John Stossel has already explained it better. First, he delivers a great quote about why competition keeps prices low.

In a free market, a business that is complacent about costs learns that its prices are too high when it sees lower-cost competitors …

In today’s New York Times, David Leonhardt talks about the problem of health care choice. Specifically, the fact that most people don’t have any choice. He starts out making a lot of sense.

Health insurers often act like monopolies — like a cable company or the Department of Motor Vehicles — because they resemble …