The John Locke Foundation’s Katherine Restrepo has completed a report that makes recommendations for how to improve Medicaid in North Carolina. If you are interested in actuarial particulars, you can read the entire report here. It isn’t exactly something I can boil down to a single paragraph; particularly while listening to the Everly Brothers.
What I liked most about the report was its fresh suggestion that people should bear personal responsibility for maintaining their own health. Normally discussions are distorted out of deference to people with no power to help themselves. Their unfortunate lot is fallaciously extrapolated to normal people whose health in some instances depends on personal choice; e.g., should I subsist on Reece’s Peanut Butter Cups and diet soda, should I share needles, and should I tressle off the railroad bridge? Then, we combine that with a PC rush to expand definitions of disease to include consequences of personal choice.
Health is a good thing, so why shouldn’t it be incentivized? “For starters,” saith Restrepo, “it would make sense for a universal, refundable tax credit to be distributed to healthier, able-bodied Medicaid patients.”
