Everyone knows Stossel, right? The guy who lectures on the incredible power of the free market and thinks anyone who doesn’t agree with him on economics is too stupid to vote (an opinion he expressed a few columns back)? Who’d have thought he’d ever come out and announce that free-market principles are bad?
Yet here he is in his latest column, explaining that competition between insurance companies is a bad thing because it (gasp!) “pushed them to offer ever more-attractive policies” and people actually (gasp again!) bought them!
Of course, that’s sort of how the free market works: Companies compete to offer better, more attractive products and deals to bring in more business. Is Stossel seriously saying this is now a bad thing?
In this case, yes. According to him, companies offering us policies that cover everything, instead of restricting their offer to catastrophic illness, is a bad thing, because—well, the free market just shouldn’t offer us choices like that! And we shouldn’t take it if they do!
Stossel tries to justify this anti-free market outburst by repeating the myth that people with health insurance, particularly when provided by their employer, don’t care about the costs, which is what drives up health costs in general. The trouble with this theory is, it’s crap: Only people at the absolute top of the ladder (CEOs and the like) have such fabulous policies that price really isn’t an object (according to a study done last year).
The rest of us still have to shell out for a copay when we go to the doctor, hit the E/R or buy our meds. It’s true, under my insurance policy at The Log, doctors don’t get to compete on price—something Stossel has previously cited as one of the flaws in the current system—but they’re still competing on quality—which when it comes to medical care, that suits me just fine (I can’t see any way that going to the cheapest doctor solely because they’re cheap is a good thing).
What this is really about is that with health insurance and the lack of it such a hot topic of late, some libertarians aren’t comfortable with the traditional assertion that “It’s not government’s responsibility to solve your health care problems.” For Stossel, who seems to view the free market as a magic wand that can miraculously solve all problems, there has to be an explanation why the market hasn’t already made health care more affordable.
His solution: Blame the consumer: Health insurance makes it too easy for us to blow corporate money, and if we were thrown back on our own resources, everything would work perfectly because we’d spend wisely.
And somehow he’s jumped from that point, which is flimsy enough in itself (I know from experience that going without health insurance doesn’t mean careful spending, it often means going without health care completely) to arguing that companies selling insurance in the free market and people choosing to buy what they’re selling is inherently a bad thing.
For a guy who boasts about what a deep thinker he is on these issues, he sounds to me like a complete ninnyhammer.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 10:07 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.