Posted from National Center for Policy Analysis

By John Goodman — Consider this:

Proposition One:  No health insurance company should be able to turn down any applicant or charge a higher premium because of health status.

Proposition Two:  The federal government should tell you what health insurance you must have, where you will get it and what price you must pay and levy steep fines on you and your employer if you fail to comply.

Proposition One is what people thought they heard Barack Obama say during the election, and they voted for it. Proposition Two is what they are now hearing from Congress and they’re not buying it. Yet what has never been said publicly is that Two follows from One. That is, it is almost impossible to have One (which people seem to want) without Two (which they don’t want).

Can Barack Obama (with all his oratorical skills) convince people that One and Two are related and that they have to accept Two in order to have One? I doubt it.

As I have said many times, almost no one on Capitol Hill or in the Obama Administration understands health care as a complex system. Invariably, they think they can enact ideas that are popular and avoid ideas that are unpopular without understanding that they are all linked. It is only when politicians sit down with economists who are trained to analyze complex systems that it dawns on them that they are in a very unpleasant trap. They have been in that trap for the past eight months, and no one seems to know how to get out of it. The only thing worse would be for the Republicans to jump in the same trap with them.

Here’s how we get from Prop One to Prop Two in 10 hard-to-disconnect steps:

1. If we know we can buy health insurance after we get sick with no increase in premiums, none of us will want to pay premiums for insurance while we are healthy. Yet, if only the sick are paying premiums, the entire insurance system will collapse.
2. So to prevent collapse, there must be a requirement that people buy in when they are healthy.
3. Now if the requirement is a general mandate — with lots of coverage options — we are back to a variation of the problem in 1. People will choose scaled down, inexpensive insurance when they are healthy and then switch to comprehensive, expensive insurance after they get sick.
4. So to prevent a meltdown similar to the one described in 1, choices must be eliminated and there must be a standard (government-defined) benefit package which all individuals are required to buy and all insurers are required to sell. People won’t be allowed to buy anything less generous and no insurer would be foolish enough to offer anything more generous.
5. Now suppose there is a health insurance Exchange where people get their insurance, but insurance can also be sold outside the Exchange. In particular, imagine a special deal offered to the Iron Man’s Club (requirement: swim a mile, run 10 miles and bicycle 20 miles). Soon, word would get out that anyone who can qualify for Iron Man membership can get the standard benefit package for a really cheap price. In this, and in other ways, insurers outside the Exchange would siphon away the healthiest people leaving the Exchange with the sickest, most costly enrollees.
6. So to prevent the death spiral the conditions in 5 would lead to, insurance outside the Exchange would have to be outlawed and insurance within the Exchange highly regulated. (See below.)
7. How can you force people to buy insurance? Since cattle prods are too impractical and prison cells are too expensive, about the only practical tool is a fine. And if you want it to work, the fine needs to be near (and maybe even above) the premium people have to pay.
8. Of course, there is this problem: How can we know whether anyone has insurance? The easiest way — without a new bureaucracy — is to rely on the income tax system. Make people show proof of insurance at the time they file their income taxes.
9. Trouble is: People file tax returns once a year and most people who are currently uninsured are uninsured for less than a year. So a logical way to get to people with greater regularity is to use the employers as an enforcement mechanism.
10. Once employers are involved, however, we run into the unfortunate fact that most people believe that premium payments are an addition to wages, not a substitute for them. So to the question, “should we mandate that you buy insurance or that your employer buy it for you,” the employer tends to win hands down. Result: both an individual mandate and an employer mandate seem inevitable.

Notice the cyclical pattern in all of this. You distort incentives in a complex system and you get perverse behavior. To prevent that, you distort incentives some more and you get other kinds of perverse behavior. The more you intervene, the greater the need for even more intervention.

So what’s the answer?  We need to reject Proposition One and find a better way of solving that problem.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 10:02 am and is filed under Failed Policy, Obama. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.