Myth Busters #15: Easy-to-Understand Health Insurance? →
John Goodman, making sense on health insurance and third-party payment.
The fact is that health insurance is complicated because health care is complicated. Congress may think it can wave a magic wand and declare that it should be simple, but that is like passing a law that declares ice should not be so damned cold.
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The biggest complicating factor is third-party payment. It is incredibly complicated to pay someone else’s bills — for anything. How would you like to be responsible for paying my grocery bills? Or my clothing bills? Or my transportation bills? How would you write the contract for any of that?
It is far easier to make a sum of money available to me and let me go get my own services and pay the bills myself. Now that would be an easy-to-understand contract! It would be one sentence — “Here’s $XXX. Go get your own services.”
If Congress wants health care financing to be “easy to understand,” it should remove the third-party from the mix.