The cost of free health care

Awesome article here about how universal health care is much less economically viable than leaving it to the private sector.

Somehow they propose to offer and subsidize more health care without raising costs for the majority of Americans who already have it.

What next? Consume more calories, weigh less?

Both Democrats suggest that prevention will contain costs. But as the Washington Post reported last month, with a few exceptions like childhood vaccinations, health economist Louise B. Russell's 1986 work, "Is Prevention Better Than Cure?" found that "prevention activities tend to cost more than they save. Since the book's appearance, her observation has been borne out by studies of hundreds of interventions - everything from providing mammograms for all women and prescribing drugs to people with high cholesterol to requiring passenger-side air bags in cars and shortening the response time of ambulances."

Preventative medicine, on an individual basis, probably saves some money, but a government mandate for preventative measures is going to cost something. At least according to this source, a cost greater than that of leaving people to their own devices.

The McCain plan would provide an annual tax credit of $2,500 per individual or $5,000 per family. The idea is to encourage families to buy their own health care plans - preferably plans that save consumers money when they follow healthy lifestyles and make smart economic choices.

Unlike Clinton and Obama, McCain would not require that insurers cover people with chronic illnesses. Instead, McCain proposes state "guaranteed access plans" for those patients.

Politically, Plan McCain may be suicide. Clinton and Obama have kept to the current employer-based system - which gives workers the happy illusion of not paying for their health care, when in fact it comes out of their paychecks.

Like President Bush, however, McCain has concluded that the best way to curb health care costs is to return the incentive to save to patients. Because when you know a doctor's visit will cost only $25 and that you won't have to pay for a test you may not need, you have no incentive to economize. That's the problem with the status quo: The cheaper we make it look, the more it ends up costing.

It makes a lot of sense in a tragedy of the commons sense. If everyone has to pay for everyone else's health care, it only makes sense for people to utilize the available system to the greatest extent they can. If people were forced to pay for their tests/treatments, at least in part, it curbs the incentive for any unnecessary medical care.