The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell takes on the concept of "moral-hazard" as relates to health care insurance, calling it a "myth" that is "overblown" as a factor in consumption of health services. Moral-hazard is "the term economists use to describe the fact that insurance can change the behavior of the person being insured."
He argues that rich people don't consume more of such services just because they can afford them, and it is easily demonstrable that uninsured Americans are less healthy, in part I'm sure because they often do not seek treatments that they cannot afford. The moral-hazard argument may in fact be overblown, though I'm not convinced that it's an insignificant factor in the way the average American makes decisions about whether or not to seek treatment for one ailment or another.
But whether or not you favor a government-run national health care program, it's difficult to argue that our existing system doesn't need major reform in the way that health services are delivered to citizens. Here's an excerpt, but read it all...
One of the great mysteries of political life in the United States is why Americans are so devoted to their health-care system. Six times in the past century—during the First World War, during the Depression, during the Truman and Johnson Administrations, in the Senate in the nineteen-seventies, and during the Clinton years—efforts have been made to introduce some kind of universal health insurance, and each time the efforts have been rejected. Instead, the United States has opted for a makeshift system of increasing complexity and dysfunction. Americans spend $5,267 per capita on health care every year, almost two and half times the industrialized world’s median of $2,193; the extra spending comes to hundreds of billions of dollars a year. What does that extra spending buy us? Americans have fewer doctors per capita than most Western countries. We go to the doctor less than people in other Western countries. We get admitted to the hospital less frequently than people in other Western countries. We are less satisfied with our health care than our counterparts in other countries. American life expectancy is lower than the Western average. Childhood-immunization rates in the United States are lower than average. Infant-mortality rates are in the nineteenth percentile of industrialized nations.(via RCP) Posted by dan at August 25, 2005 12:44 PM | TrackBack