Advancing a Free Society

The insanity of health insurance

Monday, February 27, 2012

I just received a lovely email from my old friend, Donna Brazile. OK, we’re not old friends. For some reason she has decided to put me on her email list. She writes:

This week, the Senate votes on a GOP amendment that would let your employer decide what health care you can receive. If they morally object to birth control, it’s gone. If some corporation thinks cancer screening is too expensive, forget it.

This amendment is dangerous, and the people pushing it need to lose their jobs.

It is insane that we get our health care from our employers. That happens because we have given a tax advantage to in-kind compensation such as health care. It’s a horrible idea and it leads people to complain about our employers deciding what health care we can receive. Our employers are just a conduit for government mandates, rent-seeking and inefficiency related to health care. What the government has done is tax-advantage health care via employers and then tell them what has to be covered. So the real outrage is that because of this, the government mandates the mix of my compensation package, biasing it toward a luxury health-care package that is the result of special interest clamoring.


The people who think it’s normal–the ones who work in the big white domed building downtown from where I live–should lose their jobs.