Health Insurance A Public, Not Private, Good, Op Ed Says

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 09 Aug 2007 - 4:00 PDT

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"Health care is a classic public good that should be supported by a social compact: The healthy should pay into the system to underwrite care for those who need it now, both as a matter of civic morality and self-interest," columnist Chris Satullo writes in a Philadelphia Inquirer opinion piece. He notes that public goods "include things such as education, clean air and health care," adding, "These things are not the same as toaster ovens. Public policy that pretends they are is doomed to fail."

Conservatives' "market-besotted health care ideas, such as medical savings accounts, seek to explode that compact" because they see health care as a private good, according to Satullo. The "wrong-headed view has been on display in recent weeks as Congress debated" SCHIP reauthorization and expansion legislation, according to Satullo.

He says that the Democratic approach to health care reform "also has many flaws, chiefly its addiction to the never-wise and now collapsing idea of workplace coverage." He continues, "What's needed is a brave new strategy, tied neither to Democratic/union nostalgia for workplace coverage nor to Republican market theology." He concludes that "only the feds can really do what's needed: Organize the market rationally so it covers all at a basic level, wastes less and offers consumers intelligible, workable choices" (Satullo, Philadelphia Inquirer, 8/7).

Reprinted with kind permission from http://www.kaisernetwork.org. You can view the entire Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report, search the archives, or sign up for email delivery at http://www.kaisernetwork.org/dailyreports/healthpolicy. The Kaiser Daily Health Policy Report is published for kaisernetwork.org, a free service of The Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation. © 2005 Advisory Board Company and Kaiser Family Foundation. All rights reserved.