Maybe men should have their wives make medical choices for them. Women tend to out live men.

John Stossel had a segment last night about health insurance and Whole Foods. They use a catastrophic insurance with health savings account model for their employees. While the employees like the plan, their main issue is trying to get up front pricing.

A more in-depth analysis would incorporate utility curves, which differ widely among individuals. Individual market purchasing provides a much better fit to consumer needs.

The giant problem with health care reform and inserting government as a 3d party intermediary – not even an agency function, as Warren describes above, rather simple administrative party – is that government has limited resources, and does not have your interests in mind in its calculation, hence there must and will be some determinative body charged with making decisions for scarce resource allocations absent a market-clearing price mechanism.

People are completely price inelastic when it comes to catastrophic illness. Government (or agent acting on behalf of the government) is not.

It should also be noted that much of cutting-edge medicine falls in the high cost/high risk area, and these innovations will be killed off under state-run (or single payer or “government option”) health care, as government will not fund them.

Even if we had no government intervention, it wouldn’t work like underwear and TVs

Try this approach. Ask: “How can this nation spend even one dollar on (non-essential of choice; movie tickets, CDs, jewelry, vacation travel…), much less the $X billion (actual GDP component), as long as there is one child without insurance?”

Indeed, turn the argument back onto government itself. How can the NEA spend even one dollar on art, as long as there is a child without insurance?

That will necessarily force your legistlative assistant colleague to face the fact that life means trade-offs.

However, you’re talking past the folks who are advocating for single-payer. They fully acknowledge that you sometimes won’t get what you (think you) want and that a government system is inherently less capable of following your desires than you could be on your own. But that’s ok, those are features, not bug; the argument goes that the third model is better than the second model, and possibly the first model, too. Since you don’t _really_ know what’s good for you, you see, and technocratic and autocratic top-down solutions are capable of both discovering what’s good for you and dispassionately carrying it out.

The above presumes that I am willing to ascribe only the very best of intentions to those pushing for a single-payer system (or the equivalent system in which the insurance companies become public utilities which are totally regulated). But in reality it’s substantially just Yet Another Government Power Grab ™.