Friday, September 11, 2009
Obama's Healthcare Speech: Can You Have Too Many Choices?
If you want to read more on the subject of what happens when a person is offered too many choices in an area that is rather complex, I highly suggest Thaler and Sunstein's book "Nudge". Specifically chapter 10 on Medicare Part D (i.e. prescription drugs for the elderly).
Also, if you like the necklace and want one for yourself, just head on over to Surly-Ramics.
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2 comments:
Yeah, when I was watching his speech the first thing I thought of when he mentioned that idea was how people have a hard time simply choosing pizza toppings from a wide selection. It's not that I think that it's necessarily a bad idea, it's just that the average person simply is not an expert on what type of health insurance coverage they need.
Making some sort of really simple layout of each company's options set up side-by-side for comparison might help, but then again it might not. We might end up with a situation something like we have now for tax time: some people work out their taxes for themselves, but most people end up hiring somebody else to figure out their taxes for them. Maybe the economy can be stimulated by companies such as H & R Block starting up insurance assistance branches to go along with their tax assistance branches.
The main thing I was a bit concerned about in his speech, though, was how he was basically saying that much of the proposed program would be funded by future savings that future changes would bring, and by those alone. That's a nice idea, but the problem is that those savings don't actually exist yet. What if for some reason the actual savings end up not being equal to the expected and required savings?
All in all, though, I really think that these proposed programs and suchlike are all overlooking one important aspect. They're all looking at ways in which people can pay the high medical costs. What about looking at ways of reducing those initial costs as well? That would make an even wider-ranging improvement in things. As things currently stand, many medical procedures cost far more than they ought to. There are all sorts of things responsible for that, such as doctors or hospitals now having to pay huge amounts of insurance themselves in case of malpractice suits. So we have the patients' insurance paying for the doctors' insurance against the patients.
Personally, I would see about figuring out how to reduce the initial costs first. Then I'd assess how things stood and how insurance worked in the new situation, and after that work out what insurance programs would best work.
Lots of good points. With the malpractice insurance thing, in the book "Nudge" Thaler and Sunstein actually came up with an idea to fix that. Basically, the patient could choose to sign a waver prior to getting any health services. This waver would essentially be waving the patients right to sue for damages should something go wrong. In return, the cost of care would be lowered. I thought it was an interesting idea, but I don't see it ever catching on.
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