The U.S. Congress is an assembly of scolds when it comes to raising money for healthcare reform, wanting, for example, to hike the health insurance premiums of people behaving badly — such those who smoke, don’t exercise regularly, or eat too much — and tax those who spend what the Congress considers to be “too much” for health insurance or who consume bad foods like sugary drinks.

By starting with the tax system, Congress can ultimately achieve true reform.
Mainstream economists generally agree that current U.S. tax policy for health insurance is fundamentally irrational, regressive, and ultimately destructive. Fixing this system should be one of Congress’s top priorities when it comes to health reform. Sadly, the current Congressional health-reform proposals would leave the worst feature of the current system in place and make a bad situation worse.

The fundamental problem with health care reform is the absence of realistic plans to reduce unit costs. Without cost controls , tens of millions of newly-insured people will further cripple U.S. global competitiveness, which is already grievously injured because the U.S. spends roughly 70 percent more on health care, as a percentage of GDP, than other developed nations, yet cannot point to commensurate 70 percent increases in value.

Can you get what you need in a government-run health-insurance market?
Virtually all current health-care-reform plans feature a monopoly health-insurance store, operated by federal or state governments, for those who lack employer- or government-sponsored insurance and want to qualify for government subsidies. Advocates claim these monopoly markets will control costs through their purchasing power and enhance price competition by simplifying comparison shopping. When insurers are forced to compete on price, they will prod health-service providers for increased efficiency.

Of course.
After all, providing universal coverage, at, say, an average cost of $5,000 per person, will cost at most $250 billion annually and likely less because some of the uninsured can afford to pay part of the cost of their health insurance—a quarter earn more than $40,000- and many are lower-cost young people. Two hundred and fifty billion dollars is a large sum, for sure, but not overwhelming relative to the trillions of expenditures in the stimulus bills.