Arnold Kling spends a lot of time explaining that what we think of isn't health insurance. "[W]hat we call health insurance covers things like new eyeglasses, which is not a rare, catastrophic event." Alright. So call it health coverage. He argues that what we really need to do is move towards "something that looks like insurance, not like a scheme to insulate individual consumers from all health expenses." But why? Which is to say, if consumers, as they've repeatedly proven, don't want insurance, but instead want insulation, why shouldn't we seek to make that work (as it does in a variety of other countries and systems). Eyeglasses may be predictable, but they're still expensive, and folks seem to like the fact that they don't have to pay the costs all at once, and the genetically lucky have to give a bit to the genetically unlucky. Just because we call it insurance, doesn't mean we want what we buy to protect our house from fire.
