Brawner: Thinking About Health Care
by July 2, 2012 9:44 pm 89 views
Stephens Media columnist Steve Brawner takes a stab at the health care decision rendered by the Supreme Court.
Ever the centrist, Brawner thinks a longer-term debate towards a longer-term solution would have been better for the shaping of the federal health care law, which was upheld by the high court.
Brawner also understands that meeting in the middle is out of fashion these days. Still, he offers this analogy and analysis in putting perspective to the state of health care and how partisan solutions are unlikely to solve real world problems:
I think my real problem with the Affordable Care Act isn’t that it’s some kind of radical change but that it’s much more of the same: More big government and more big insurance. The biggest problem with the way we finance health care is that it’s not a free market in any way. Consumers don’t act like consumers and sellers don’t act like sellers because the recipient rarely pays for the service when he or she receives it. A third party pays most of i
t later.
I think consumers need to feel the cost of something so that they’ll consume less of it and shop around for better prices when they do. I think insurance needs to be seen as a hedge against big loss and that we need to be personally responsible for our minor ailments.
What if a hefty “food premium” were held out of paychecks at the beginning of the month? What if there were no price tags at the supermarket, and consumers bought whatever the clerks told them to buy and then made a small food co-payment, and maybe a bill came later in the mail and maybe it didn’t? And what if sometimes the supermarket was paid for its services, and sometimes it wasn’t?
I think we’d be talking about a crisis in the food delivery system.
Read Brawner's full take at this link.