Your body is scanned and monitored by implanted bots; the fight against terrorism made that necessary anyway. All insurance based on the idea of expense reimbursement is banned. But if you get sick, they send you some money. Plain ol’ cash, to spend as you please. (Off-line we can debate whether this is the government, the private sector, or some mix.)
This would address cost escalation, boost equity, and eliminate the risk of being bounced by an insurance company, the three core problems cited by Brad DeLong.
The monitors also help us pay wealth-maximizing bonuses for those who get their prostates checked every month.
Larry Kotlikoff has proposed some version of this, minus the scanners and the check-up bonuses.
Keep in mind that standard single-payer plans give the poor, by the standard of their own preferences, far too much health care. Let’s say a pauper received the same standard of care as a rich man; he would rather have the value in cash instead. I suspect many of these people would rather have 50 cents in cash than $1 in health care, so right there many of these plans are losing half of their value per dollar spent.
It’s not a bad idea as long as there is a cap on the total amount of cash everyone can get over his/her life (one may understand Larry Kotlikoff’s annual voucher as an advanced payment of this total amount).
“his/her”?? “His” is sufficient.
But if you get sick, they send you some money.
Great, I’ll be looking forward to a profitable career in disease acquisition.
The monitors also help us pay wealth-maximizing bonuses for those who get their prostates checked every month
Funniest thing I’ve read in a long time. . . Thanks!
Bots?
It seems to me much of whatever information these wonder bots could glean can currently be obtained by monthly screening of weight and a few simple blood tests. Of course no one would submit to such an imposition on their personal lives, and of course the usual crowd will complain about the expense of such an endeavor although if implemented earlier we’d have seen the type II diabetes and obesity wave coming from a long way off and have planned accordingly.
The advantage of wonder bots I suppose would be if they could detect cancers at an early stage. Although my limited knowledge of biology leads me to believe a lot of false positives would be detected, as I understand it cells go wrong all the time but only some of the time do they become a successful (dangerous) tumor, but that’s an engineering exercise left to be solved once wonder bots are available in the first place, with ponies of course.
At any rate such detection capabilities presumably would allow destruction of tumors at an early stage, reducing the cost of treatment and thus obviating the need to worry about adverse selection of potential cancer patients. So everyone can start smoking again, I see a wonderful new world arising out of this technology, can someone with literary skills get started on the requisite sci-fi novels right away?
Then again given Western society’s current technophilia injecting seawater into people’s veins and telling them they need to come back every month for a transfusion of new bots while running tests on the bots already in their blood lets you have the best of both worlds, minus the ponies.
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