Health Insurance

Ezra has a very good post about health insurance here.

He knows way more about health care/insurance policy than I do, so go read what he has to say.

The nickle summary is that basically, markets are really good for delivering to the public shoes or fruit or breakfast cereal, but they are bad for delivering health insurance. Primarily this is because the health care market and health insurance market are not the same. If a health insurance company became increasingly good at delivering quality effective healthcare, it would be increasingly LESS competitive, because it would attract more and more users who needed healthcare. It is in an insurance company's best interest to find ways to eliminate high risk, chronically ill and other expensive patients from their rolls, and insure only the young and healthy.

And let me add that this isn't because people that run health insurance companies are bad people who rejoice in denying coverage to the ill (though some may be). They are just trying to run an efficient profitable business in a free market as defined by current regulatory market. It's the structure of the market that needs to change (or be replaced with a government program).

But like I said, go read it.