People are bashing Rep. David Dreier (R-CA) for saying that people diagnosed with brain tumors shouldn’t be provided millions of dollars of health care. What he meant was that it’s stupid for someone who is uninsured and has received a horrible medical diagnosis to then be insured against receiving a horrible medical diagnosis. They are effectively asking a for-profit corporation to pick up their medical bills. That’s not insurance, and that’s not a viable medical system.
But that’s precisely why insurance is not the right model for medical care. In a system with private for-profit insurance, you will have people who are insured and people who are not. What we want is a system in which everyone is covered all the time, from birth to sickness to death. Rather than buying health insurance, people should purchase health coverage paid for through payroll taxes.
Instead, we get these ad hoc high-risk insurance pools which are created for people who either had no insurance and got sick or lost their insurance after having been sick (through job loss, for example). They aren’t insurable at any reasonable or affordable rate. So, it’s just pretend insurance. We pretend that it makes sense to insure someone who has a brain tumor, when that makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
But it also makes no sense to leave people without medical care for any reason, ever. It makes no sense to bankrupt people when they get sick. The whole system is horrible and illogical and inhumane.
ObamaCare is a vast improvement over what we had before, but we really ought to give up on private for-profit health insurance. It’s dumb.
Rep. David Dreier is correct. But he draws the wrong conclusions.
