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"Yes, Americans Could Live Without Government-Defined Health Insurance" --Hadley Arkes in The Federalist
By The James Wilson Institute •
Posted on Jan 16 2017
Writing in The Federalist with a piece titled, "Yes, Americans Could Live Without Government-Defined Health Insurance," Prof. Arkes notes the simple truth that Americans are indeed intelligent enough to make provisions for their medical needs without the government mandating health insurance. Some excerpts:
"Why do we assume that the American people will be thrown into a panic if faced with the need to take care of themselves, and see doctors—gasp—without insurance? Has it suddenly become unthinkable that ordinary Americans, doctors, or businessmen could summon the wit to find other ways of attending to their medical needs as they did in the past, when their world was not thickly woven with layers of insurance?"
"Now costs have escalated since various companies have to move medical bills through layers of insurance, with staff added just to keep track of the insurance. As the old line used to have it, we could just imagine what would happen to the cost of groceries if a dramatic rise in prices brought forth a clamor for 'food insurance.' The proverbial 'middlemen' would be displaced by layers of administrators clearing the bills through levels of insurance.
"This convention of insurance has been so woven into our lives, so absorbed now in our sense of the world, that it will require some intervening steps to preserve levels of insurance for people who would feel endangered without it. That is especially the case if they bear those 'pre-existing conditions' that make them more expensive to insure."
Read the whole piece here.