Health care in the United States has many flaws. Insurance coverage is too unstable, and the quality of care provided is all too often of low quality and insensitive to the needs of the patient.
But that does not mean we need to start from scratch. Most Americans, especially those working for larger employers, still have good insurance protection which provides them with ready access to some of the finest medical institutions in the world.
In a rush to solve every problem with more centralized government control, we could make matters much worse.
Gary Andres and I published a piece recently in the Washington Times in which we argue legislating should be like practicing medicine, with the first rule being “do no harm.”
In the piece, we offer up one idea for covering more of the uninsured without reinventing the wheel. A sizeable portion of the uninsured population is composed of workers and their families experiencing a temporary break in coverage based on job switching. What’s needed for these workers and their families is not a massive new government entitlement but sensible and reliable bridge insurance to cover breaks in coverage that naturally occur in a flexible labor market. The full article is available here.