TGIF: Health Insurance Scam

How can you get insurance for a volitional act? Regardless of one’s position on abortion, there is no denying that it is something a woman chooses. It doesn’t happen without her initiative and consent. My objective here is not moral judgment but precision. For all kinds of reasons a pregnant woman might feel she needs [...]

Not with a Bang But a Whimper

Social change can be revolutionary, sudden, and swift. More commonly it moves at a glacier pace. Yet glaciers work great change, and great damage, given enough time.

Health Care’s Muddled Incentives

On the topic of health care, what empirical observations are reliable? Unfortunately, many “facts” come freighted with a great deal of ideological baggage. Those skeptical of markets, who favor a large role for government in health care, tend to emphasize statistics that disparage the American healthcare system. For supporters of markets, it is tempting to try to [...]

Insurance Companies Want a Mandate with Teeth

The health-insurance lobbyist  complains that under the proposed healthcare overhaul the penalties on individuals who don’t buy coverage would be too mild and would encourage people to wait until they are sick before buying a policy — at which point they couldn’t be turned down or charged more than healthy people.That’s right. The industry wants [...]

Arrogance

It’s crazy for a group of mere mortals to try to design 15 percent of the U.S. economy. It’s even crazier to do it in a few months. Yet that is what some members of Congress presumed to do. They intended, as the New York Times put it, “to reinvent the nation’s health care system.” [...]

Competition Would Save Medicine, Too

Competition so regularly brings us better stuff—cars, phones, shoes, medicine—that we’ve come to expect it. We complain on the rare occasion the supermarket doesn’t carry a particular ice-cream flavor. We just assume the store will have 30,000 items, that it will be open 24/7, and that the food will be fresh and cheap. I take [...]

What Free Market in Health Insurance?

John Goodman of NCPA has no superior when it comes to analyzing the economics of the healthcare industry. Here’s his latest post on the insurance problem. Key quote: So, when is the last time you heard about a life insurance company dropping someone’s coverage because he got AIDS? Never happens. What about jacking up someone’s [...]

Book Reviews – January 2008

• The Cure: How Capitalism Can Save American Health Care
  
  by David Gratzer Reviewed by Jane M. Orient
  
• Self-Determination: The Other Path for Native Americans
  Edited by Terry L. Anderson, Bruce L. Benson, and Thomas F. Flanagan Reviewed by William L. Anderson, Jr.
  
• The Wal-Mart Revolution
  by Richard Vedder and Wendell Cox Reviewed by George Leef
• On the Wealth of Nations
  by P.J. O’Rourke Reviewed by Raymond J. Keating