This blog contains posts and comments written by students in Dr. Tufte's economics classes at Southern Utah University.
10/15/2005
Insuring Yourself
I found this article called “Insuring Yourself” it stated that the number of Americans without health insurance has risen by 800,000 just last year, reaching an all time high of 45.8 million. Of those 45.8 million more than 21 million were full-time employees. With the rising costs of health care employers are asking their employees to bear some of the burden for insurance premiums. Some people have chosen to purchase their own insurance through licensed companies in their state. There are only about five percent of Americans who are doing this, but this number is expected to rise in the next few years. This article kind of scared me. I can’t believe that there are that many people in America without insurance. Insurance is expensive, but with the increasing cost of health care I think that it is very necessary to have. In another class I learned that the Europeans just pay higher taxes and get their health care for free. You would think that if that was the case the health care would not be so good, but the Europeans think that it is great. Would you rather pay higher taxes in order to get your health care for free?
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2 comments:
With respect to the issue of employers wanting us to pay more we should keep in mind that it is pretty weird that our employers buy anything for us in the first place.
Morgan makes the common mistake of claiming that lack of insurance and lack of health care are the same thing. They're not. This is about who pays, not whether or not they get service. You could just as easily say that 85% of the population is forbidden from doing comparison shopping for medical care. That doesn't sound very nice, does it?
This is no knock on Taylor - who discusses the issue from a pretty common perspective - but I'd like to take this discussion in a different direction.
I have two points. First, health care is expensive because it works. Second, health care is a luxury and we should expect its share of income to go up as our incomes do.
Health care is a big part of our budgets because we want what we are paying for. If it didn't work, not only would it be cheap, but we wouldn't want it. Critcizing U.S. health care because we spend so much on it is like saying people who by Mercedes should get a rebate because their payments are a large.
Secondly, there is overwhelming evidence that people consider health care a luxury (the income elasticity is in the range of 2). This means that if our economy grows by 10% our health care spending will grow by 20%. This also means that people who think we ought to spend less on health care would be satisfied if we got poorer. That's idiotic, but so is worrying about how much rich people pay for luxuries.
I agree everyone needs to realize how important health insurance is and find a way to insure yourself. Health coverage can be a great aspect to many lives.
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