Health care game changer?

[Brittain33]

In any event, sbane, you are an adult and should have your own plan, with subsidies if impecunious (obviously temporary in your case). Tying adult kids to their parents' hip does not fit into my sense of aesthetics.

didn't you say your parents paid for 8 years of college?

Yes, they did, college, business school and law school (and I know I am very fortunate, yes I do), with their own money, not someone else's through statutorily imposed non means tested cross subsidies.

Money is fungible. If the government mandates that people will be paid more in the form of mandatory health insurance, this will translate into lower cash compensation over time. But since the numbers involved are fairly minimal no one's going to notice.

[Brittain33]

There is nothing approaching a "free market" in health insurance, with or without some of the tinkering Obamacare does around the edges.

[Brittain33]

It is not possible to have a regulation that simultaneously makes consumers, insurance agencies, and health care providers *all* better-off. 

Yet this comes close. If there's a market inefficiency or a prisoner's dilemma that is cured with a regulation, it's possible for everyone to be better off.

[Brittain33]

What are the market inefficiencies, other than those perhaps caused by government regulation, to wit, one cannot shop for plans outside one's own state?

If you can shop for plans outside your state, all insurance companies will relocate to the state (South Dakota, Delaware, take your pick) that offers it the least regulation and croniest enforcers, and decline to offer policies adhering to higher standards, and that will be all that's in the market. We can rule that out.

The market is inefficient because:
1. Customers are woefully underinformed about what procedures to get and what they should cost, and it's not realistic for them to become experts
2. People often need health care at times where it's an emergency and they can't comparison shop or do their homework
3. The tax provisions which tie insurance to compensation mean that many companies have oligopsonistic power which hurts everyone outside of them
4. Similarly, with health care as a form of compensation, individuals don't have incentive to know or care what things cost
5. People value life and health in bizarre ways that break market analysis
6. Yes, government regulation
7. Adverse selection
8. Moral hazard

[Brittain33]

Wow I'd completely forgotten about the complete flip flop the right did on the mandate I'd actually read up on it earlier this year.  Thanks for the info.

Back when the right was pursuing privatization of Social Security, they held up Chile as the model to use. Chile's system is based on... a mandate forcing people to save. Which means that if and when the Republicans bring up social security privatization again, they're going to have to deal with the idea of the mandate or push through a repeal that guts the program altogether.