Minor Thoughts from me to you

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 monopolies. Consumers, instead of being able to choose freely among insurers, are restricted to the plans their employer offers. So insurers are spared the rigors of true competition, and they end up with high costs and spotty service.

But then, discussing the Wyden-Bennett bill, he makes less sense.

In the simplest version, families would receive a voucher worth as much as their employer spends on their health insurance. They would then buy an insurance plan on an "exchange" where insurers would compete for their business. The government would regulate this exchange. Insurers would be required to offer basic benefits, and insurers that attracted a sicker group of patients would be subsidized by those that attracted a healthier group.

The immediate advantage would be that people could choose a plan that fit their own preferences, rather than having to accept a plan chosen by human resources. You would be able to carry your plan from one job to the next -- or hold onto it if you found yourself unemployed. You would never have to switch doctors because your employer switched insurance plans.

The problem with this idea is that it really doesn't offer much choice. Insurance companies are still protected from competition by the friendly confines of a government controlled "exchange". True choice would consist of an open market place where any entrepreneur can offer any product to any interested consumer. The success or failure of the product would depend on one all important criteria: whether or not consumers saw any value in it. Insurers would no longer be able to foist their plans on consumers who don't want them. And entrepreneurs would be free to introduce radical, new products that threaten the current insurance companies.

That kind of free choice wouldn't exist under an insurance "exchange". Each new product would have to be carefully weighed and analyzed by government bureaucrats. Nothing new would be approved unless they determined that it was worthwhile and useful. Existing insurance companies would have a hand in writing the regulations and only products that conform to the current status-quo would be allowed in. Anything that threatens that status-quo would be barred from the "exchange" and never offered to consumers. The end result would be akin to Ford's infamous statement that consumers could buy any color car they wanted -- as long as it was black.

Instead of fostering innovation and creativity in health care, the Wyden-Bennett bill would take the current "insurance" industry and lock it in cement. Consumers would continue to be forced to buy health insurance not health care and bureaucrats would continue to dicatate how, when, and where their health care dollars can be spent.

All of this makes me happy to hear that Wyden-Bennett doesn't have much support in the Senate.