Healthcare Revolution

President Bush's proposal to make health insurance over $15,000 taxable (and for everyone to get a tax deduction for the first $15,000 of coverage) has rankled more than a few liberals while leaving most everyone else scratching their heads.

This isn't surprising since most of us don't even think about healthcare until something goes wrong and we end up in the E.R. or we're sick and need to see a doctor. And almost none of us worry about insurance unless we don't have it or are about to lose it.

From personal experience, I can say that insurance is a complete racket designed to insure almost exclusively the people who won't be using its services. Don't even try to get insurance if you've had any kind of cancer, even the most treatable kind. You will be blacklisted. Heart attack, high blood pressure, high cholesterol? The same thing. Now it is at the point where you will be subjected to higher premiums simply for being overweight even if you have no negative health symptoms.

Jeff Jacoby has a column that hails the president's initiative as a way of forcing all of us to think more about health insurance and make more of our own decisions. The theory is that if everybody is buying health insurance, the industry will have to offer better, cheaper plans to keep clients.

I'm a little skeptical of this, not because I haven't seen competition work in other areas, but because I think most people are too lazy to actually look for their own insurance or take more common costs (like doctor's visits) on themselves. Are people really willing to pay for their own doctor's visits in a cheaper health plan if they can get their employer to pay it all now? I'm not convinced most people would want to do this.