It seems like on any given weekday morning over the last 6 months you could flip on the television to CNN or the like to see Obama talking to a select crowd in Ohio on health care. HIs favorite rhetoric on the topic is to talk about insuring everyone with preexisting conditions that those evil and lucrative insurance companies refuse to insure. You could then flip it to another 24 hr. news cycle to see Mitch McConnell or John McCain informing us that the Republicans also have ideas for health reform including providing insurance to those with preexisting conditions. This seems to be one of the only bipartisan agreements in the whole health care debate. It sounds like a great idea, but nobody seems be asking the question; what about the costs?
We have to look at health insurance as a means of spreading out risk amongst a large number of people by pooling everybody’s money together and redistributing it to those who need it. I pay insurance that I might never use, but it will go to help the poor guy down the street when he has a heart attack. That’s why insurance companies refuse to insure people with preexisting conditions. They are at greater risk, and if insurance companies insure them the cost for the pool increases. The result is that the price of insurance is higher for everybody isn’t it? I find it hard to believe that the only reason people with preexisting conditions aren’t covered is so the evil insurance executives can head home with extremely fat checks. The cost of health care is expensive and is not likely to change until we make it a consumer based system. The costs of insuring everybody have to go somewhere, and isn’t that going to be the consumer who is already pleased with is or her health insurance?
I’m not saying it’s an ok thing for people with preexisting conditions to continue to go without health insurance, but it’s time to look at reality. Quality health care has a price and there is only so much of it to go around. We will have to pay one way or another to insure them. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and legislators don’t have a magic wand that will just make those costs disappear. Thomas Sowell put it this way in his latest article:
It costs politicians nothing to mandate more insurance coverage for more people. But that doesn’t mean that the costs vanish into thin air. It simply means that both buyers and sellers of insurance are forced to pay costs that neither of them wants to pay. But, because soaring political rhetoric leaves out such grubby things as costs, it sounds like a great deal.