http://www.smartmoney.com/invisiblehand/index.cfm?story=20070912&hpadref=1&pgnum=2
The Invisible Hand
Retired Doctor Devises Plan to Cure Health Care
By Igor Greenwald |Igor Greenwald Archive |Published: September 12, 2007
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Fogoros serves up something like a layer cake: at the bottom, a sizable self-financed health savings account (with the government subsidizing the contribution on a sliding scale for the poor). Any money that’s not used up could be saved toward retirement or allocated toward optional insurance.
Those who’ve exhausted their health account would be entitled to a share of the rationed health-care pool. Treatments would be covered or not based on a cost-benefit analysis treating each human being as equally valuable but seeking to equalize the opportunities for a healthy life over time. So a quadriplegic’s life would be deemed no less valuable than anyone else’s, but at the same time young patients would get some preference over the old who’ve already lived it up. Patients with greater odds of being helped would also gain priority. This sounds like common sense, even if it’s common sense we would prefer not to exercise at the moment.
Beyond rationed care, the rich would remain free to bankroll the many fanciful treatment alternatives, doubling as guinea pigs for the rationed system that would look to adopt the most cost-effective advances. Fogoros understands that the public debates about what to pay for could get quite awkward, and the system, any system, can and will be gamed. But he’s right to argue that this will still improve on the mess we’ve got.
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At the very least, it would seem that we could end the distortion from the WW2 Wage and Price controls. At that time, since wages were frozen, businesses were allowed to give “benefits” that didn’t count towards the “controls”. That’s where we got into the whole insurance mess. We allowed the gooferment to put us into a meme that allows businesses to deduct healthcare expense but individuals are not. At the very least, we should level the playing field. My preference would be to get the businesses out of involvement with my healthcare. Having been in my own business, I was allowed to deduct my healthcare insurance cost. Love it. I think when the marketplace “figures it out”, we will become a nation of contractors. Cheaper for businesses and better for individuals.
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Reinke Faces Life 