Below The Beltway

This piece explains succinctly what’s really wrong with the health care system:

I’m no fan of our existing health care system, even though it’s been working out fine for me because I’m well insured, have access to family and friends who are doctors, can afford out-of-network specialists, and have generally managed to end-run the hideous insurance company bureaucracies that drive more and more medical decisions.

With all due respect, the idea that there is a “free market” in health care for consumers is nonsense. A free market assumes that participants are knowledgeable and understand the choices they’re being asked to make. That’s not the case with health care, as anyone who has tried to analyze Medicare-supplement plans or pick among insurance options offered by his employer can tell you. Should you find yourself in a rural area far from home with a mysterious and troubling pain, you’re not exactly in a position to bargain with the local walk-in clinic or hospital emergency room.

The health care status quo isn’t going to work over the long term. For one thing, absent a huge change, the cost of Medicare threatens to financially cripple the country. Plus, we already have nonmedical forces determining how care works. Insurance companies increasingly try to tell doctors and hospitals and medical-device makers what procedures to perform, what to charge for them, and what drugs to prescribe.

There’s absolutely nothing in HR 3200 or any of the alternatives that are being debated that would change that one iota. If anything, the type of “reform” that the Obama Administration is advocating would even further remove any consumer/patient choice from the market and would put even more power in the hands of government bureaucrats and, yes, insurance companies. And, as Dave Schuler notes, having your health care controlled by a bureaucrat isn’t a good thing regardless of whether we’re talking about an insurance company bureaucrat or a government bureaucrat.