Robert J. Samuelson
neatly summarizes the insurance mess. He hits the weak points of
Medicare and the tax expenditure for employer-provided insurance, the
rejection of HMOs and managed care, then wraps up with:
Americans want more health care for less money, and when they don’t get
it, they indict drug companies, insurers, trial lawyers and
bureaucrats. Although these familiar scapegoats may not be blameless,
the real problem is us. We demand the impossible. The changes we truly
need are political. We need to reconnect people with the public
consequences of their private acts. We should curb the subsidization of
private insurance. Medicare recipients, especially wealthier ones,
should pay more of their bills. But these changes won’t happen because
people don’t want to see the costs. We don’t have the health care
system we need, but we do have the one we deserve.
