Maggie's Farm

The change in medical care. I refuse to term it "health care," since health needs no care other than one's own reasonably-sensible and attentive but not health-obsessed life, combined with the main factor - luck. From a commenter at Allahpundit:

Perhaps the concept of ‘insurance’ isn’t the right one for health care?

I always liked the comparison that was trying to be made with car insurance…

Yet for there to be an equivalent your car insurance would have to cover:
- maintenance tune-ups, including oil and filter changes
- the cost of repairs for any reason
- a price break per gallon of gas
- an annual detailing
- the cost of tires
- a new muffler annually
- and never, ever raising the cost of your insurance no matter how many accidents you were in, how many tickets you got… anything

Imagine what car insurance would be like if we modeled that on health insurance coverage and you get an idea why health insurance coverage is so high. And why get fuel efficient vehicles if you are getting the gas subsidized? Or bother with the maintenance if you’ll get a brand new engine if you forgot about it? And the cost of such insurance would be… lower than what you have now?

The number of shades of maroon that went into trying to make this entire ‘insurance’ concept work for one’s health is plain nuts. It isn’t ‘insurance’ if you are going to use it constantly… you want something else.

Perhaps a clue.

Health insurance used to be an executive ‘perk’ because it was TOO EXPENSIVE to provide for everyone in the workforce. Businesses got a price break for it to entice people who would not normally come to work to do so during WWII. The war ended. The subsidy via the tax code did not. Strangely enough before this misbegotten idea got infested into the tax code and people’s minds, individuals did not drop over dead in the street and did work out payment schedules WITH hospitals and physicians. Amazingly that worked and there was a strong system of charitable hospitals and care givers to pick up the slack. Then government got involved and screwed it up.

Government is all about money. Government's expertise is perverse incentives. The Obama-thing, like the previous Hillary-thing, is not technically insurance. It's just pre-paid medical costs, spread across populations and subsidized, or not, by income and with bureaucrats deciding what you can get paid on it.

That's not an entirely insane idea, except that whenever government gets involved with things outside their Constitutional mandate, things turn out wrong and over-controlling by the standards of a free country. Always.

I do not believe that most Americans want every detail of their lives politicized. I think they want to be left alone, but maybe I am old-fashioned.