OK. Popa’s turn.
I love talking about health insurance.
Health insurance is a problem that will never go away unless we change the premises.
Technology is improving in all fields at a rapid pace. In most fields, we don’t invest in it, and don’t use what could be available, because it costs too much.
In medicine, we use all the most sophisticated advances, and invest heavily in making new ones. This is not surprising; we will pay everything we have to be cured when we are sick. Therefore, we will continue to invent new, necessarily more expensive, procedures and machines, and all pay to use them. We will only stop when we run out of available credit and assets.
So, is there no way out? Health care costs cannot go down, they can only go up. If a new machine is invented, we will want to use it. It will cost more.
As long as we insist that everyone must have access to the highest quality health care, costs will always go up.
There are two ways out.
A. We can prohibit new research. In five years, todays technology will be cheap, and health care will be cheap.
B. We can supply a fixed amount of care, and ration it based on need, not based on money. It will be illegal to pay for health care. Then, we only supply the amount that society can afford. (This is what Canada and Europe do. Yes, it is.)
If neither of those options is palatable, we need to rethink our assumption that everyone should get highest quality health care. Maybe it is ok for society to allow everyone to get the level they can afford. We can allow companies to sell insurance policies which cover 1995 technology only. Or, foreign educated doctors only. Hey, Japanese in 1995 weren’t so terribly neglected.