Stop Me Before I Vote Again

Dennis Kucinich, alone among the Demo contenders, wants universal single-payer health care. But even he, it seems, feels that the insurance companies ought to be "bought out" by the taxpayers.

Why? What's to buy? If you condemn somebody's land for a road, I can see it. But the Kucinich scheme is more like compensating TV broadcasters for building the Internet. You compensate people when you take their property, not their customers.

Personally, I can't think of a group I'd sooner see left high and dry than the insurance companies. -- Well, maybe hedge funds. And anybody in the real-estate business.

Now that we face mandated payment increases which, given the structural dynamics of that gracious sector, will surely produce lots and lots of even faster and higher price increases, and little in the way of more medical services... it's prolly not too soon to start talkin' price cap policy.

The proper method is already well understood: we can set the overall price level change in the sector at the level of the rest of the economy. I.e. avoid excess sectoral inflation but allow the intra-sector relative prices are to adjust among themselves.

Feature this: markups (over input costs) for our entire health services and products sector are as amenable to control by pseudo-market mechanisms as, say ... utility pollution!

Yup -- what we need here is a national health sector cap and trade system for markup over input costs.

Complicated to implement?

Nope -- give me a team of med-poli-econs for advice, and a little time to interwire the sectors' accounting departments, and I'll run a tip-top cap and trade market out of a medium-sized Washington hotel.

This great man --

-- Abba Lerner by name, provided all the necessary answers to containing national medical costs 38 years ago:

http://pfr.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/2/199