The Wall Street Journal posited this in a Wednesday op-ed.
1. Provide a path to catastrophic health insurance for all Americans.
The WSJ then supports this with old saws: being covered generally leads to better medical results, health insurance is good for the wallet, and so on. Then they want a government solution—while they carefully avoid saying how they would pay for it:
The ObamaCare replacement should make it possible for all people to get health insurance that provides coverage for basic prevention, like vaccines, and expensive medical care that exceeds, perhaps, $5,000 for individuals.
Those Americans who don’t get health insurance through employers, or Medicare and Medicaid, should be eligible for a refundable tax credit….
They don’t even say why catastrophic health insurance should be particularly targeted by Government. They ignore an actual market solution for this: free market competition, accompanied with lower tax rates (which leave more money in people’s pockets), and no annual or income caps or requirements for high deductible insurance plans (and no requirement for any insurance plan at all) on Health Savings Accounts. Folks are fully capable of making their own decisions about the structure of their health insurance plans without the Know Betters of Government holding them by the hand. And insurance companies, in a fully competitive environment, are fully capable of developing and delivering the products actual customers want without Government mandates. If that includes catastrophic insurance plans, those will appear.
2. Accommodate people with pre-existing health conditions.
See above regarding free markets. Of course such coverage would come at a higher cost than other sorts of health coverages; the risk being transferred to the insurer is higher. But even this risk is not certain. Folks who’ve had a heart attack (or more than one), for instance, have a preexisting condition (unless a single heart attack has occurred sufficiently far in the past that a medical doctor (the patient’s, not the insurer’s or a Government hireling) says it’s a one-off and not preexisting), but not everyone who’s had heart attacks will have their next one simultaneously. Even a preexisting condition can be amortized across time given a free market that allows pooling of [those who’ve had heart attacks] so that premiums can be adjusted to match the actual payout requirements, the actual risk—just like “ordinary” insurance plans.
So as long as someone remains insured, he should be allowed to move from employer coverage to the individual market without facing exclusions or higher premiums based on his health status.
This conflates two separate questions. The preexisting question is addressed just above. The mobility of an insuree (or someone who’d like to buy a health insurance plan) is separate: and yes, in a free market environment, an insuree would be able to take the plan he’s purchased, whether originally obtained through his employer (unless it was the employer who actually did the purchase and the premium payments) or bought on the individual market, with him wherever he went or to whatever job he moved. The latter case, too, would reduce or eliminate the need for the new employer to offer health insurance coverage through his benefits program.
3. Allow broad access to health-savings accounts.
There should be a one-time federal tax credit to encourage all Americans to open an HSA and begin using it to pay for routine medical bills. And HSAs combined with high-deductible insurance should be incorporated directly into the Medicare and Medicaid programs.
Another Government solution—again carefully unpaid for—and it’s much too timid. I addressed HSAs and their market availability above.
4. Deregulate the market for medical services.
This is the only move necessary. It’s the move to enable the free market solution.
Full stop.
