Everywhere I’ve been lately the topic of conversation is always about health care reform.  The water cooler, the parking lot, the grocery store, even in the bathroom.  Everyone has an opinion and everyone thinks they’re right.  The current debate in health care reform is exactly the sort of topic Weakonomics was born to handle.

And it can be summed up in two generalizations:

• Healthy people with health insurance they can afford don’t want health care reform.
• Everyone else does.

The funny thing is neither side acknowledges the other and both have crowded out their own arguments with pointless bickering about legislation that doesn’t even exist.  All this talk about death panels, public options, and single-payer are crap.  Why?  Because there is no one bill.  Countless politicians from both sides of the aisle keep telling the public there are at least 5 proposals going through Capitol Hill and none have even left committee.  But of course the media filters what they want and we’re left with Glenn Beck doing what he does.  (Side-note, I’ll bet O’Rielly is pissed because no one talks about him now the Beck is Fox’s resident psycho).

There is a lot of haze cast over the issue thanks to the media coverage and we’ve got people up in arms and very passionate about either side of the issue.  These public protests are serving as a distraction to the actual need for health care reform.  Perhaps you have health insurance you can afford, you are possibly objecting to reform because of the “public option” so often discussed.  Because you’re so focused on that one aspect of reform you’re not allowing yourself to potentially benefit from the legislation.  What if the bill didn’t include a public option?  If the fanatics were polled in private instead of on camera with this question you might find that many are open to reform if it saves them money.

So take out the “public option” and perhaps get the people against reform on your side.  Wrong!  It won’t work.  This is because the same people that were passionate before will just find something else to get crazy about in any of the proposed bills.  They’ll use buzzwords like socialism, anti-capitalism, or “this is what Obama wants” to mobilize the crazies again.  But that is inevitable making it a useless point for this post.

However I’m not just a hater on the vocal minority you see on TV.  The people FOR reform are just as bad.  The public option is again the pain point.  People for universal healthcare are only in favor of it because they don’t want to have to think about insurance or are worried they will not get appropriate coverage from insurers at a reasonable price.  I have a solution.  Dump the “public option”.

But the cool thing is you really won’t dump it.  If you’re familiar with how a government sponsored student loan works you’ll get this pretty quickly.  Basically, in a student loan like this the private banks provide the funding but the government steps in if there is a problem.  Do this for the public option.  Let the insurance company collect a premium from you and after you hit a certain amount of medical costs the government covers the rest.  You only ever work with the insurer and the insurer collects from the government.  This way the insurer bears some of the immediate risk but none of the big risk.  This will allow you to have a cheaper premium.  As to where the government will get the funds to cover the rest that funding will come in the form of efficiency savings that come from bulk purchases and some kind of fee or tax on the program, charged to the purchaser.  No one complains about student loans so no one should complain about this.

I’m not pretending to have a solution to every problem in health care but what I do have is a potential solution to the problem of covering people who are not insured.

The most important thing is I didn’t once talk about actual reform.  This would be laws, tax cuts, and yes government spending designed to cut costs for everyone involved in the health care industry.  This “coverage for all” debate is so distracting that even I didn’t get around to talking about actual reform.  And that’s what I hate most about this issue.  The fact that the “public option” is such a distraction tells me we might not see any reform at all.

Photo: goulao

By The Weakonomist

The Weakonomist is the founder of Weakonomics. Clicking the picture of the puppy will tell you more about him. If you like what you're reading consider subscribing to the blog, following him on Twitter, and checking out the related posts below. Please consider a donation if you really enjoy Weakonomics.

categories: business, government