Saturday, January 9, 2010

Health Cooperatives

One of my favorite college professors has an opinion piece on health cooperatives in the Christian Science Monitor. Here's the money quote:

The solution is to abolish Medicare and Medicaid, abolish the favorable tax treatment of employer-provided insurance, impose a one-price rule on procedures, and issue a voucher to every single American citizen. The creation of a voucher program would certainly take less than 1,990 pages of legislative language. This will solve the problem of the uninsured completely, immediately, and permanently in a transparent way that works with, rather than against, competition. The big losers will be special interest groups because a transparent voucher system will rob them of their ability to manipulate the system. They know this all too well, which is why they oppose it.
And this article further explains his voucher-based solution.