I support insurance coverage for regular check-ups. Don’t misunderstand me: I applaud the new laws that facilitate that. I see no moral hazard problem with very poor people getting basic, government-sponsored health coverage. These plans are unlikely to contain the frills people would exploit.
What I oppose is the decades-old tax exemption for employer health insurance, which applies to employees of all incomes. As I said,
Surely every college student here knows someone who regularly buys prescription Adderall, Ritalin, Vicodin, Oxycontin, or the like, not because he actually needs it, but because he wants to stay up late studying, or wants more energy, or enjoys feeling no pain. Rich people with expensive insurance often get coverage for gym memberships.
Examples aside, health care as a proportion of the GDP has increased every year for the last four decades. Almost all the increase comes from an explosion in treating minor ailments. Moral hazards and the employer health care deduction offer an obvious explanation for this increased spending on minor ailments. Sinistral, you claim this explanation is “absurd”; if you have a better one, by all means, share it. The point is, we can’t keep spending more treating minor ailments. It’s wasting our GDP and making it impossible for the US economy to keep pace with that of China, where these little luxuries are near-unheard of.
Zeppelin, you mention the value of preventive medicine. As I said, I support insurance coverage for regular check-ups. Beyond check-ups? I have consistently read that doctors test too often for common ailments like breast cancer and prostate cancer, at ages when patients are extraordinarily unlikely to have them, and when detection by testing is unlikely at best. Sinistral can probably speak more on this subject. The testing issue ties back to tort reform: doctors run unnecessary tests because they fear catastrophic tort claims.
Perhaps by “preventive medicine” you mean “healthy lifestyle.” I support this above all, but I don’t think doctors can make people exercise more, eat less, sleep more and drink less. I think the New York City trans fat ban is an excellent example of how the government can help keep people healthy. But the self-destructive American lifestyle is a much broader topic.
This is like saying, “Curing sick patients is much more important than biology minutiae.” Tax benefits are the reason employers began offering health care several decades ago. These “tax minutiae” induce people to spend billions on luxurious health care they wouldn’t spend otherwise, and then to exploit all its frills. You don’t want to descend to the details, because you don’t know the details, but your ignorance does not make those details matter less.
You want “solutions to the high costs of the medical system.” The new laws utterly fail to address high costs, except by cutting Medicare spending. Instead, they increase taxes and fees to pay for expanded coverage. I suggested that tax reform and tort reform could make the system more efficient. Of course, these are dry subjects, and surely the minutiae are very boring. As it happens, these reforms are exactly what economic conservatives and many disinterested law professors are advocating. If you have better suggestions for how the federal government can make health care more efficient, by all means.
Right on cue, Arac arrives to take his bitter potshots, then vanishes under the cover of flippant irony. Years ago, he would argue in long paragraphs with Silhouette, who liked Harold Bloom and the Beatles, but ever since discussing PETA in 2008, Arac seems to have lost heart for extended rhetoric. Perhaps his postmodern Brown education has instilled in him a distrust of chauvinistic “rationality”? Has Arac undergone Barthes’ “death of the author,” wherein the ego behind the text vanishes, leaving only the wordplay itself? Rather than address my arguments, Arac now paints caricatures of my past arguments, then pokes fun at their grotesqueness. Has he not become a linguistic world unto himself?