Another day, another push to mandate insurance coverage for obscure treatments.
Ah, gentle reader, I feel for the people who need this, for the family whose child’s name is on the law, and for all the sob stories the media, activists, and politicians will dredge up to appeal to our emotions so that we won’t realize that this, and the drive to ever-more mandate ever-more outflows from the insurance companies will create ever-more increases in premiums to pay for the treatments that most people will not and, indeed, cannot use.
Oh, Brian J., you monster! What would you propose? Well, non-profits can gather funds for “increasing awareness” and “engaging with legislators.” Perhaps some of them could help with the treatment payments instead of employing people with humanities degrees, good hearts, and a taste for the finer things in life.
Ultimately, though, health care costs have spiraled for decades because the government has made it happen through legislation and enforcement and businesses have learned how to make the requirements more profitable for themselves.
Here I am, paying $2800 on health insurance (down, actually, since I was dropped from COBRA due to a software bug and went to an unsubsidized marketplace provider). Which is up $24,000 a year from when I paid my whole health insurance bill as a self-employed computer consultant. So, yeah, I am sensitive to the forces which continue to drive this increase year-over-year. Both government mandates and the big insurance company drives for ever-increasing profits and stock price heights.
In Brian J.’s pseudo-libertarian perfect world, health care costs would go down over time with increasing efficiencies and competition in the marketplace. Like you see for unsubsidized procedures like cosmetic surgery and, in the old days, LASIK surgery (they still do it, I guess, but they certainly don’t advertise for it like they used to). More freestanding health care clinics would spring up along with the diagnostic storefronts you can find if you look for them. And maybe I could go to my barber to set a broken limb or get a tooth extracted. I’m only kinda funnin’ here.
But stories like this, and the legislation they trigger, never talk about the tradeoffs. They only talk about the balm for people who are suffering difficulty or suffer a loss.
