Columnist Kinsley Suggests Incremental Health Reforms, Rather Than Single Payer System

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Article Date: 21 Mar 2006 - 22:00 PDT

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"Let's try some more modest reforms before plunging into [a] single-payer" health insurance system, columnist Michael Kinsley writes in a Washington Post opinion piece in response to an article by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in the New York Review of Books. He adds that "society cannot give the average citizen better health care than the average citizen would choose to buy on his or her own. And this is what people want." Kinsley says, "People who can afford insurance ought to protect themselves against a catastrophic health expense. But subsidizing this insurance for them is not only unnecessary, it is futile and unfair," adding, "No one is better able to afford health care for people of average means or above than they are themselves." Kinsley writes that a "serious defect" of the single-payer system "is that it makes all sorts of unbearable trade-offs explicit government policy, rather than obscuring them in complexities." He writes, "There are the makings of a deal here. Better-off or better-insured people could be told, individually or as a group: Give up your health care subsidy and you may opt out of any rationing-type restrictions that the system imposes." Kinsley concludes, "And if a few smaller reforms like that don't work, maybe it will be time for [a] single-payer" system (Kinsley, Washington Post, 3/17).

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