"If you set up a market-based health system, allowing insurance companies to pick and choose who and what they will cover, you give them overwhelming incentives to dump, deny, avoid and neglect the sick people. And when you operate the system mainly through employers (as we do), you impose intense costs on U.S. industry and you ensure that the pool of people without insurance tends to include the unhealthiest, costliest cases around. Economists call this 'adverse selection' and when there is too much adverse selection—when the health of the people in the uninsured pool is extremely different from the average person in the country—the market may fail completely. Insurance companies may just deny people coverage entirely.
"This is a problem at the core of our health care woes."
In Slate, Austan Goolsbee, an advisor to Barak Obama, ponders Michael Moore's Sicko.
No comments:
Post a Comment