Monday, April 05, 2010

An alternative healthcare reform

Obama's healthcare plan requires individuals to buy insurance, requires insurance companies to accept all customers, and subsidizes those who cannot afford to buy insurance themselves. Public funding and private provisioning can be a good idea, but the flaws with Obamacare have been well documented elsewhere.

I am not interested in libertarian healthcare approaches that leave people to die, nor am I interest in nationalized services either.

The most interested alternative came from Warren Mosler -- here it is in a nutshell:

1. Every year, everyone gets $5000 from the Fed.
2. The first $1000 is to be used on preventative care. It's use it or lose it money.
3. The next $4000 can be used on healthcare or not. If you don't use it all up, you keep the balance.
4. If you use it all up, and need more healthcare, medicare kicks in.

The question most interesting to me is: what will this do to prices (both generally, and in healthcare). Generally, printing money they way this plan does creates an inflationary bias. But, if healthcare is riddled with all the inefficiency from private insurance claimed by the left, and inefficiency in delivery claimed by the right, then this should get market forces acting to reduce costs and improve service as consumers exercise their choices and produce Good Deflation. Very interesting.

1 Comments:

Blogger Ohm (Ώ) said...

Thumbs Up! Reblogged here:

http://ohm.typepad.com/blog/2010/05/innovation.html

11:21 PM  

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