A lot of people who were smart enough to notice that Switzerland has a very good health care system were not smart enough to appreciate that Switzerland is full of Swiss people, while the United States is full of ungovernable maniacs.
And also:
The United States is governed by cowards, and so the dirty work—putting downward pressure on consumption—is jobbed out to the health insurance companies, which, in turn, are run by the kind of finance weenies who weren’t smart enough to make it on Wall Street, abetted by bottom-shelf middle managers, and overseen by the class of businessmen who are not creative enough to start businesses and too lazy to sell real estate. Dealing with health insurance companies is, along with the humiliations of commercial air travel and trying to cancel a gym membership or an online subscription, the leading cause of anti-capitalism in the United States; insurance companies have created more de facto socialists than every English-language edition of the works of Karl Marx put together.
Zing!
Personally I think most of the rest of what Williamson says in that piece is more or less ridiculous (if not laughably naive) hand-waving on behalf the “unjustly regulated good nature of the Free Market.” But that’s Williamson for you. (MRIs only cost a couple hundred bucks, you silly communist bastards. Glory be to the age of wonders, we can all now pay for our health care just like we do our cheap cell phones!)
On the one hand he admits that insurance companies “create ersatz prices for consumers in the form of absurdly complex and cumbrous procedures for reimbursement and approval, wearing the consumer down until he accepts a higher real cost or a lower real benefit. Transparency is out, opacity is in.” But on the other hand, he’s basically arguing that this is only because The Government does not allow them to “use prices to organize their business activities.”
Don’t you understand? It’s only business.
(I’m currently gearing up for my 4th afternoon of phone calls in the last month for a bill received 15 months after the “date of service” — a bill which itself amounts to more than my entire out-of-pocket max for that year. I have yet to learn why this happened or how it will turn out, but so far it actually looks like the insurance company is the one who has my back and it’s the hospital “nonprofit healthcare delivery network” that I’m fighting. But I’m sure that’s the government’s fault too.)
If you want a better take on what health insurance is, ought to be, and why — and not some nonsense and tired distraction about “financial v. medical products” and the ever-unfairly treated Free Market — I recommend Freddie deBoer.