lines in the sand

Health Insurance - Risk vs Cost

Rainbough Phillips explains what’s wrong with health insurance, but it isn’t what she thinks.

What’s wrong is people’s expectations of health insurance

Health insurance is not health care. Health care is simply one of life’s budget requirements, like food, shelter, clothing, transportation or education. Insurance is how you deal with the risks of unexpected events. We want low deductible, low co-pay insurance plans that cover anything recommended by a doctor. If auto insurance worked that way it would cover oil changes, tune ups and a set of new tires. That isn’t insurance, it’s maintenance, cost of living.

Lexus drivers cost insurers more than Corolla drivers and pay higher premiums. Likewise, people like Ms. Phillips who have active uteri will cost insurers more as a group - many pregnancies are even planned, not unexpected - so they have higher premiums. True insurance covers the cost of unexpectedly becoming pregnant, the shared risk. If she expects people who have no risk, my single son, for example,to pay those expenses, she doesn’t want risk sharing (insurance), she wants cost sharing (socialism?)

But healthcare is just too expensive for most people, right? Insurance is one of the reasons. We try to make things like healthcare and education more affordable by throwning money at them with insurance, medicare, scholarships and loans. That’s crazy. It really just makes people more able to afford those things creating higher demand and prices go up.

It’s more than people wanting insurance to cover an aspirin from the ER (it happens). I had a situation where my doctor prescribed two tests for me; a simple fluid sample, and a nuclear scan. The need for the scan really depended on the fluid results, but it was convenient for me and the doc to ahead and get both at the same time, and insurance covers both. If it were my money, I would ask “Why not get the results of the cheaper test first, then see if the other is still necessary?” It’s amazing how many patients get incensed if the insurance company asks that.

Also, providers generally start with a “sticker price” for their services. Your insurer probably has a discount deal with them and rarely pays full price. Likewise, a relative of mine who chooses not to buy insurance has found very deep discounts available from most providers when he tells them he is paying the bill himself.

Ms. Phillips posts on a generally libertarian blog and should understand that while risk sharing is an effective economic tool, cost sharing puts all of society at risk.

Islands from Space

For someone like me, that is, a beachbum who likes maps, islands and space pictures, Alan Sullivan found the perfect site: Oceandots.

Where in the world?...

When I fly, I want to know exactly where the plane is at any given time and my companions often tire of comments like, "Look!  There's Chipley, Artis Gilmore's hometown."  Even when it's a friend or relative flying rather than me, I'm checking up on them every few minutes on FlyteComm.

Some people are less concerned about their whereabouts, though, like German tourist Tobi Gutt, who didn't suspect his ticket wasn't for the Sidney in Australia until he was about to board a commuter flight in Billings, Montana.

HT Sean

Kodak's Moment

Now this is a commercial-

My wife and mother-in-law hadn't even seen this when they gave me a Kodak z612 for Christmas to replace the ten-year-old Olympus 1.3mp I've been using.  The blog should start getting a little more colorful now.

HT Andrew Roth

Don't Laugh

This is probably the best thing Scott Ott ever wrote at Scrappleface.com, and it isn't even funny.  As so often happens with sites like his or The Onion, some people miss the joke.  One of them, a newspaper editor, took him to task for painfully misleading Katrina victims and he responded.

(Aside: For years, I've told people that Walter Cronkite lied every day when he said "That's the way it is."  One part of Scott's post explains that better than I ever did.

Since what we know about America flows mostly from the media, we can be certain that most of what we know is just plain wrong, or at least atypical. My old journalism professor used to say, ‘News is coups, earthquakes and three-legged chickens.’

In other words, Walter Cronkite was exactly wrong to say ‘That’s the way it is.’ Journalists don’t report the truth about life. They are carnival barkers selling the unusual, the atypical, the freaks. And we continue to reward them for doing so.

The actual truth about life in our great Republic is quite different from the daily portrayals in the media.)

But that's just a minor point.  Read the whole thing.

Can This Work?

Greg Mankiw proposes a way to help low wage earners:

1. A wage subsidy for unskilled workers, paid for by
2. A tax on employers who hire unskilled workers.

So what could be wrong this?

Now, if you think like an economist, you might wonder about the logic of part 2 of this proposal. You might say, "A tax on the hiring of unskilled workers would discourage their employment, offsetting some of the benefits they would get from the wage subsidy. It would be better to finance the wage subsidy with a more general tax, rather than with a tax targeted specifically on employers of unskilled workers."

That's right.  He's talking about the minimum wage.  Maybe the alleged purpose of providing a "living wage" would be better served by paying a subsidy to employers, say, 20% of wages at $7.50 per hour phased to 0% at $10.00.  Just a thought.

Google Thinking Free?

I've been using the ThinkFree Online Office for a while.  Working from as many as six different locations (including the house and the beach) makes having my stuff available in one place for all of them pretty handy.

Not surprisingly, Information Week reports that Google is showing interest in the site.

That isn't bad news for me.  I keep using Google for more and more things; maps, news reader, calendar, and yes, even searches.

As IW points out, since ThinkFree's goal is to create an online clone of MS Office, it would be interesting to see what direction that would take under Google.

Boom, Boom!

I haven't paid much attention to the news this afternoon, but I'm guessing from the two booms that just rattled the Christmas tree that they decided to land the shuttle at KSC after all.

I suspected they would.  It's overcast here, but the clouds are high and the rain hasn't arrived yet.

Tux in Space

Sasha Volokh rounds up Moon Penquins.