Public vs. Private Is the Wrong Focus in Reform Debate

In the heat of political debates, it’s easy to focus on the wrong problem:

“It’s unfortunate that so much of the health care debate is about whether insurance companies — or for that matter, the government — are good or bad. The cost problem, which in turn is the accessibility problem, is due to the third-party payer system, and that system exists whether one uses bureaucratic private insurance companies or bureaucratic government to pay routine bills that patients should be paying themselves.”

Look past the question of “Who should we get our insurance from?” to ask “What should we expect insurance to do?”

(Cross-posted from State House Call.)

Permission to reprint this blog post in whole or in part is hereby granted, provided that the author (or authors) and the Mackinac Center for Public Policy are properly cited.