Who Says The Right Is Out Of Ideas?

by digby

Maha found this gem at the Cato Institute:

I have discovered a proposal for “fixing” health care on the Cato Institute website that is an absolute hoot. The plan (see PDF) is to eliminate employee health benefit insurance and all government health care support, and throw everyone into the private insurance market. Insurance companies would be allowed to risk-rate premiums, so that as people got older and/or sicker their premiums would go up. However, Cato says, this doesn’t have to be a problem. The solution is … wait for it … insurance insurance. They call it “health status insurance,” but essentially it’s insurance insurance. It’s a separate policy you take that will insure you against catastrophic increases in your health insurance. I’m not kidding. That’s the brilliant plan.

She explains that in order to make it work, it requires that everyone, including young healthy people voluntarily buy in and also carry the insurance insurance, which sounds perfectly doable, right?

If that doesn’t work out I assume there will soon be a market for insurance insurance insurance, for those who are under covered and over charged by the first two, which would create yet another market for insurance insurance insurance insurance.

Markets are so awesome. If only human beings weren’t involved in all this it would be perfect.

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