Is third-party payer health insurance my right?

Is third-party payer health insurance my right?

Here’s another good point from the book review I mentioned on Saturday. It challenges one of our most cherished and deeply held assumptions: that we have a right to health insurance paid by someone else whether it is your employer or the government. And one of the problems with such a system, the reviewer says, is that every state and federal entity imposes all kinds of regulations on insurance, requiring the policies to cover all kinds of services, including infertility treatments, contraceptives, and other things some people might find morally objectionable.p>

His analogy is apt. It’s as if we demanded our employers or the government to provide our auto insurance and the government required coverage of everything from gas to new paint jobs. And millions of people would not be covered by third-payer car insurance and would not be able to afford a car at all.

I know, it’s uncomfortable to think that we would have to pay for our own health insurance (although people who own their own businesses already do). But if free-market reforms were allowed to take place and the Shelobian web of regulations dismantled, the price would come down and be at least as affordable as car insurance, if not more, since auto insurance itself needs to be reformed as well. And there’s no reason there can’t be a safety net for the poor who cannot afford it themselves.

It’s funny but it didn’t more than a generation or two for all of us, liberal and conservative alike, to begin to take for granted things that our grandparents would never have imagined. We mindlessly expect to receive for nothing, things that our grandparents did for themselves. Are we better off because of it?

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