I know that there is an insurance/health care tax credit for employers that individuals don’t have and I know that it’s a relic of WW2 wage controls. That’s not the question I am asking – what I want to know, what I simply cannot understand – is WHY the tax credit is still there for employers and isn’t available for individuals.

(Actually, strike that question. I am sure there’s a political answer and that it’s a combination of corrupt political rent seeking and overspending by a federal government that is loathe to reduce tax collections in any way… so forget that question)

A better question is this: WHY is there a presumption that employers should responsible for employees’ health care? Why is there an assumption that employers who don’t offer health care plans aren’t doing right by their employees, and why is the underlying objective – on both sides of the aisle – that something should be done to FORCE those employers to offer coverage as opposed to making it EASIER for individuals to get it for themselves instead?

President Obama was giving his closing remarks to the Kabuki Summit yesterday and by the time I was yelling at the television. Why must we infantilize people and assume that they cannot take care of themselves? Why must we assume that the only way to solve a problem is to centralize authority and mandate regulations?

The whole problem with the escalation of health care costs today is that consumers don’t actually pay for what they receive. They don’t get price feedback, so they overconsume and health care suppliers overcharge. If you want to fix that problem, take away 3rd party payment systems – this means all forms of comprehensive health “insurance”, including medicare – and start exposing consumers to the true costs of their decisions. If someone is poor, then subsidize him directly, but don’t pay on his behalf and implicitly encourage him not to ask about price. If someone is already sick and needs acute care that they cannot afford, then use the system we already have, Medicaid. But we should ENCOURAGE people to ask their doctors about the price of procedures, and we should encourage doctors to market themselves and compete on the price to consumers.

That is the ONLY way to fix this.

Doubling down on medicare – which is what Obamacare is, just an expansion of the size of the 3rd party system and forcing everyone onto an even more opaque government system – is only going to make things worse. It’s that simple.