I Can Get It for You RetailRudy Giuliani's health-care plan is great for insurance companies.

Remarks from the Fray:

One of things we tend to ignore when talking about our screwed up system of health insurance in the US is the effect that wholesale insurance has had on the retail market. Consider if Medicare, Medicaid and company programs were all to disappear tomorrow. Would you see a vast swelling of the ranks of the uninsured? I doubt it, simply because without the wholesale markets insurers would have to compete for people on an individual basis. All those middle and even lower middle class people now covered by some form of company or government insurance would probably still end up insured. I wouldn't be surprised if health insurance became cheaper in this case, as no longer would there be the phenomenon of people in various jobs getting the "wholesale" price through their employer and other people paying a much higher "retail" price. On the other hand, the poor and those with existing conditions would still be SOL.

Now imagine if there was no insurance. Everyone has to pay their doctors directly. I think in many, many situations, things would be much cheaper. Drug companies would lower price in order to be able to sell the drugs. Doctors would make visits cheap enough that average people could pay. On the other hand, this would create a system where the best doctors would charge more, and the poor might receive more medical care but of lower quality.

The problem in the US is that we've created a mix of wholesale and retail where the wholesale market is the larger one, and therefore retail is much, much more expensive. We've also created a system where costs are hidden from most consumers, so the costs of drugs and treatments are inflated since they are paid by insurance.

--Adamatari

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