In his recent post on health care and insurance Paul Krugman writes:
[Insurance companies] try to avoid covering people who
are actually likely to need care.
If insurance companies do avoid covering people who are
"likely to need care," this suggests that the uninsured are
unhealthy. But 60% of the uninsured are in excellent health
(Table 10) (In fact, overall the uninsured are only slightly less healthy than the insured).
To be sure, this doesn't mean that being uninsured is not a problem
but, contra Paul, it does mean that insurance companies would be
willing to cover most of the uninsured at the same rates as the insured
if the uninsured could or would pay those rates. In Paul's story there is a market failure, in the latter story health insurance is expensive and some people don't buy it. The difference matters because the wrong diagnosis will almost surely lead to the wrong treatment.
Addendum: McArdle nicely takes the time to follow the logic.
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Oh yeah and I wish youguys had the pseudo word captchas instead of boring random letter numbers then you could see the always intersesting word verification definitions.
And another thought:
I read (here possibly) that a blogger should care more for quantity over quality, yet in blogs that are co-wrote there may be a need for a slight change to that. Tyler is a smart guy, but sometimes I think there is some absolute dreck he happens to let spew forth from his fingertips, which may not be a bad thing because it is still tolerable dreck compared to most of the blogosphere, but I can’t miss checking this page because I know that Alex will always nail down something in my head or poke some holes in it. Especially when he writes about organs, that stuff almost is gold.
No disrespect to Tyler, who keeps this thing fresh and drives the interest, and when Tyler is on top form I don’t think there is but a handful of bloggers out there who could compete. Generally what I am getting at is keep up the good work and I may just learn a little more yet!
I have not read Krugman enough to say that he always preaches the truthy liberal preconceptions to his choir, but I haven’t seen otherwise. Keep hammering him on these points Alex. Bravo.
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