Postscript …

Something just occurred to me. Kling attacks Holt and advocates of universal health insurance because under the schemes they recommend “the practice of medicine will be governed by elite technocrats, far removed from doctors and patients” – something Kling deems immoral and inefficient, as well as politically unacceptable.

Let’s suppose Kling is right. Fine. Now, under his vision of health care financing, everybody gets these high-deductible insurance policies. This puts a much greater share of health care spending on the consumer, I see. But not all of it. Catastrophic expenses – that is, everything over $5,000 a year – are still covered by insurance.

Not only does this represent care for the most seriously ill, as we’ve discussed previously. It also represents some of the most ethically tricky treatment decisions possible: Do you pursue a new, experimental cancer treatment with slim but still realistic chances of success? Do you prescribe ongoing physical therapy for somebody for whom recovery from an injury is unlikely, but still possible? Do you perform radical invasive surgery on somebody who probably, but not certainly, will die within six months?

Clearly, somebody has to make those decisions. And simply leaving it to the doctor and patient won’t work, at least according to Kling, since they’ll be insulated from cost just like they are now.

So who’s making those decisions? How? And why are those decisions any more moral and efficient than the ones being made under the schemes Holt and I have advocated?

Also from this issue

Lead Essay

  • Insulation vs. Insurance by Arnold Kling

    In this month’s lead essay, Cato Institute adjunct scholar Arnold Kling draws from his book, Crisis of Abundance, to argue that the health coverage most Americans enjoy is not insurance at all, but what he calls “insulation.” “The problem with insulation,” Kling argues, “is that it is not a sustainable form of health care finance… Insulation leads people to over-consume health care services. Americans make extravagant use of services that have high costs and low benefits.” Kling explains how real health insurance would work, and how it would help solve the crisis in health care, and explores how we could transistion to a system over time institutionally and culturally in order to resolve the inconsistent demand for insulation and affordable, effective care.

Response Essays

  • Abundance Is Insulated from a Crisis—For Now by Matthew Holt

    According to health care strategist Matthew Holt, Arnold Kling is correct that consumer insulation from the costs of “premium medicine” is partly responsible for the rising cost of health care, but Holt dissents from Kling’s solution. Holt examines what he takes to be the three main strategies for dealing with “the insulation and overuse of medical care in the U.S.”: a nationalized “single payer system; a system of “managed competition”; and “individual consumer control of spending at the point of service.” Holt argues that the latter two options face deep problems, and that a nationalized single-payer system “is the likeliest outcome in perhaps a decade or so,” even it is not politically feasible at present. “Kling has provided a decent analysis,” Holt argues, “but has proposed a solution that both ignores the political and cultural realities of the health care system, and probably wouldn’t even work in theory.”

  • Unhealthy Subsidies by Clark C. Havighurst

    Clark C. Havighurst agrees with Kling’s “diagnosis of what’s wrong with health care” in the U.S. “as far as it goes.” Havighurst goes further and digs into the reasons the U.S. health system “has evolved into an entitlement program under which everyone expects nothing less than the very best that ‘modern medicine’ has to offer.” Havighurst lays the blame at the feet of the government’s choice to subsidize the purchase of health care by “excluding the cost of employer-sponsored coverage from employees’ taxable wages and income” and lucidly details three different mechanisms by which the tax subsidy insulates workers, consumers, and voters from the costs of health care. Havighurst proposes that “something approaching [liberals’] goal of universal health coverage could be achieved by ending the current tax subsidy and offering refundable tax credits of, say, $6000 to families that spend at least that amount in health plan premiums or contributions to a health savings account.”

  • Yes, We Need Real Insurance … Real Social Insurance by Jonathan Cohn

    Jonathan Cohn, a senior editor at the New Republic, agrees with Kling that our current health care system doesn’t function according to the widely understood principles of individual insurance, but he doubts we’d do better at fighting rising costs and maintaining quality if citizens with “real” insurance were free to take price into account in their choice of care. “We have precious little evidence to believe that people can distinguish good care from bad care,” Cohn writes. And the notion that consumer choices will improve over time is, according to Cohn, “a lovely idea, but one that seems highly dubious.” Cohn argues that we need a broader notion of insurance – social insurance – to shield people not only against unexpected illness and harm, but against “genetic and economic bad luck.” Cohn argues that many nations do just fine in managing the cost/quality tradeoffs inherent in a state-controlled system of universal coverage, and that Americans would be happy with such a system “if only they knew how those systems really worked.”

The Conversation