Universal Healthcare
Worse idea ever?
It’s exactly the same situation as if we charge a 25-year-old the same amount for a year’s term life insurance as we charge his 75-year-old grandfather: it may make the insurance more affordable for Granddad, but it does so by overcharging young Elmo. Add in the “mandate,” so Elmo can’t opt out, and we have a universal care plan that forces Elmo to pay for services he doesn’t get so that Granddad can pay less for the services he gets. But it’s “voluntary” — you get to pick your insurance plan to some extent — and it’s not “tax-supported” because you are just paying the insurance company directly.
Except for the cost of administering the plan itself, and the wages they take through a garnishee if I don’t “volunteer.”
So in this mandated universal coverage plan, the government comes and makes me give someone money so it can be distributed to other people, and I don’t have any choice about participating. Where I come from, we call that a “tax.”
Whatever it is, it ain’t insurance.
More on the worst idea ever:
But this is not true. We force everyone to pay into fire departments because fires have very bad negative externalities: if your house catches on fire, unless you live on a rural farm, there’s a good chance that your neighbor’s house will burn down too. Fire prevention is a genuine public good; most health care, with the exception of things meant to stop the spread of infectious disease, simply isn’t.
One can make a modestly compelling moral hazard argument for a mandate–people will be tempted to free ride on the rest of us, knowing that we won’t deny them health care in extremis, so the only thing to do is make them pay up front. But I’m persistently disturbed by the notion that most of our fellow citizens are intellectual children who need to be forced to do what is good for them even at massive cost to their liberty, and ours.