"Homeowner’s insurance is catastrophe insurance. It pays if the house burns down — the kind of thing no one can budget for. It doesn’t cover all costs of maintaining a home; you pay most ownership costs and you comparison shop. If homeowner’s insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!"
–

Gregg Easterbrook

Easterbrook poses some great points that have clearly been overlooked by Obama and Congress:

The first step would be a standard-price rule…And the standard price must be published to allow comparison shopping. Good physicians and hospitals could still distinguish themselves through quality of care; in most of the free market, prices are similar, and quality is the basis of sales appeal.

and

We’ve got to control health care costs or the future doesn’t work. Yet the current health-care reform plan is to add more agencies and regulations.

Adding agencies to hurdle in the bureaucracy only hinders the possibility of healthcare reform. It’s possible to have a complex system with a less complex solution. Politicians just have to be convinced of this fact. Keep in mind, they’re all lawyers. They think in the ways that homeowner’s contracts are written, not in the simple ways of say Gregg Easterbrook, a sportswriter.
  1. zackshapiro posted this