Over at Businessweek, Glen Whitman criticizes the “health insurance like auto insurance” plans that many candidates (Hillary Clinton among them) are touting:
As anyone who has ever driven above 55 mph knows, mandating something is not the same as making it happen. Some people will not comply: 47 states require drivers to buy liability auto insurance, yet the median percentage of uninsured drivers in those states is 12%. Granted, that number might be even higher without the mandates. The point, however, is that any amount of noncompliance reduces the efficacy of the mandate.
None of this means the uninsured are not a problem. Yet the true issue isn’t that they cost the rest of us too much. It’s that they simply get less care than most people (one reason uncompensated care is such a small fraction of health-care spending). And if the real concern is making health insurance and health care available to those in need, we should focus on reducing health-care prices and insurance premiums. The individual mandate is, at best, a distraction from that goal.
Whitman concludes that the best way to bring health insurance to the uninsured is to have governments remove many of the current mandates for benefits, a move which he says will open the way for low-priced catastrophic coverage plans.
(Via Marginal Revolution, which today includes a post on the “nanny state” and some quality comments.)
-Greg Dahlmann