Brad DeLong’s health care plan is outed

It is described as utopian, read it here, excerpt:

20% Deductible/Out of Pocket Cap: The IRS snarfs
20% of your family economic income and uses it to pay your family
health bills. If your expenses in a year are less than 15% of your
family economic income, the balance is returned to you with your tax
refund check (or stuffed into your IRA).

Single-Payer for the Rest: All family health bills
greater than 20% of your family economic income are paid by the federal
government out of the 5% not returned (and perhaps, someday general
revenues). The main point, after all, is insurance: if you fall
seriously sick, you want right then and there to be treated whether or
not your wallet biopsy is positive.

Sin Taxes: on Tobacco, Gorgonzola, Three-Liter Bottles of
Liquid High-Fructose Corn Syrup, Tanning Clinics (Melanoma), et cetera:
Sin taxes (and, perhaps, someday general revenues) pay for an army of
barefoot doctors and nurses and mobile treatment vans roaming the
country and knocking on doors: Let me examine your prostate. Mind if I
check your refrigerator and tell you how to eat healthier? Have you
exercised today? I’m a Pilates instructor, and we could do a session
now? Are you up on your immunizations? Anybody here have a fever and
need antibiotics? Come on out to the van and I’ll clean your teeth."
The idea is to make the preventive care cheaper-than-free, to insure
that nothing with a high long-run benefit/cost ratio gets left undone
because people would rather get a bigger check the next April to use to
buy an HDTV.

A Lot of Serious Research on Best Public-Health, Chronic-Disease, and Hospital Practices

That’s it. No deduction for employer-paid health expenses. No insurance companies.

There is plenty of further rationale given, do read the whole post.  But I have to say, those rubber gloves have me worried…