Thomas Donlan‘s latest editorial commentary for Barron’s responds to those readers who seek a viable alternative to the Affordable Care Act.
A reader recently asked, “If the Affordable Care Act isn’t the answer, what is?” Another asked, “Do you really want a health-insurance system without government regulation?” These are fair questions. We have found problems with the new health-care law—both operational and philosophical—to be so compelling that even the status quo ante seems preferable, but we also have a better vision.
Neither a benevolent dictator nor an army of bureaucrats can create an ideal system that serves all possible buyers of health care and properly rewards all who provide it. Only independent individuals can operate in a market, deciding what to buy and what to sell, finding prices that clear the market.
But a market cannot work when third parties stand over the supplier and the customer to fix prices or supplies. So the first element of a good U.S. health-care system must be that all Americans must purchase their own health-insurance policy.
Unlike Obamacare, this mandate should leave lots of room for competition and choice.
Nearly all health care in the U.S. is paid for by third parties—government, employers, insurance companies—who have neither the provider’s nor the customer’s interests at heart. Individual choice is deliberately limited for the convenience of the real payers.
So the second element of a good U.S. health-care system must be that the citizens must make choices for themselves. Price and scope of coverage are the consumers’ business, not their government’s.
Health insurance is too complicated to be left to policy makers, and if we have a real market, the business will be even more complicated because every insurance company—and new ones—will create more policies tailored to the consumers’ various preferences. In a free market for health insurance, we will have at least as many different styles of health insurance as there are flavors and prices of canned soup in the supermarket.
