How to Fix Healthcare

• This is not an argument against socialism. It is an argument against all forms of loss-spreading through group insurance.

• *No* developed society attempts to deliver health care on an individual-risk basis.

1. 1. Second, consumers have the most information on what they actually require. This limits waste. Although it can be argued that individuals have insufficient medical knowledge to look after themselves, this is incorrect. Firstly, knowing when and how to see a doctor is not difficult to understand. A car requires maintenance, as does a human. Secondly, it is common economic knowledge that it is in the interest of the seller to supply the consumer with honest and accurate data. [http://www.jubileeresearch.org/finance/The_lemon_dilemma.htm] This is a system which emphasizes personal responsibility.
   2. Third, this will create open competition between doctors and pharmaceutical companies, which improves quality and lowers costs.
2. The bank accounts at all times are property of the individual. This prevents the state from using the money for anything else, as it happened in Germany with the generation-contract. Upon death of an individual, the money passes to the next of kin, but again only to their healthcare accounts.

1. Given that by and large people get sicker the older they get, expenses can be expected to be low in the first few years. Compound interest accrues. After twenty, thirty, forty years of annual payments and compound interest the bank account can have grown respectably. Once a person goes into retirement, the healthcare account may also be used to finance retirement, but again not for luxuries but only for housing and healthcare, which are the two biggest expenses which seniors face.
2. This system creates real incentives for people to eat their vegetables and exercise, as they have hard-cash motivational carrots dangling in front of them. Moreover it also avoids the injustice of having people cover other people’s expenses.
3. A small communal side-pot for expensive treatments, such as car accidents and organ transplants must be created at a cost of about 1-3% of income. These procedures are likely to exceed the individual account’s capacity, but are comparatively rare. There is no injustice in this under the Rawlsian social contract – the person in the car accident could be me or you and such an accident cannot be avoided by not smoking or working out regularly. It is fair in these instances to rely on society to bear the costs.

• As mentioned above, this is from In Pursuit of Happiness: American Conceptions of Property from the Seventeenth to the Twentieth Century, William B. Scott; Indiana University Press, 1977, page 6 "In America landownership had not always been consid­ered a right. At Jamestown the Virginia Company insisted that all land remain under company ownership as accorded by its royal charter. The Virginia Company required all of its employees to contribute "the fruits of their labor" to the common storehouse. The company distributed food and supplied to each according to his needs. After several years of near starvation the company abandoned its policy of corporate ownership and gave to each settler a three­ acre garden to support himself. This seemed to work. "For formerly when our people were fed out of the common store and labored jointly in the manuring of the ground and planting corn," noted a visitor, "glad was that man that could slip from his labor, nay, the most honest of them in a general business, would not take so much faith­ful and true pains, in a week, as now he will do in a day, neither cared they for the increase, presuming that how­soever their harvest prospered, the general store must maintain them, by which means we reaped not so much corn from the labors of 30 men as three men have done for themselves since the private allotment of land."