And if you can find an auto insurance that covers things like my busted radiator, changing the timing belt and the shocks let me know. In short, you keep asserting this,

That's a lie; and there's no point continuing this discussion with you if you're operating in this mode. I merely asserted that the per-incident versus per-annum deductible made car insurance more like a PPO plan than like an HSA-linked high-deductible plan.

The advantage of insurer paying for fertility treatment is that the overall costs are less. People who have to pay for it themselves take more riscs and have more multiples. Multiples are quite expensive in health care terms, due to pregnancy complications, prenatal care and handicapped children.

By the way: the excel spreadsheet I linked to was an OECD graph comparing public/private costs of healthcare between OECD countries. Your government (= you taxpayers) pays more for you healthcare than my government pays for our socialized healthcare.

Further, this adds additional pressure to health care because now we are subsidizing child bearing decisions, and the basic rule of thumb is when you subsidize something you get more of it. Now you have more kids also using up health care resources.

Please. If you can find an insurance company that covers that today, I’d like to see it.

Google is your friend.

Kling is wrong and so are you. Car insurance, with its per-event (not per-annum) deductibles matches HMO/PPO plans far more closely than it does the high-annual-deductible HSA-plans that he (maybe you, too) prefer.

Last time I checked Kling did not favor HSA plans and he is correct about what health insurance should be and what it is. And if you can find an auto insurance that covers things like my busted radiator, changing the timing belt and the shocks let me know. In short, you keep asserting this, but you can't back it up by pointing to a single auto insurance plan that supports your thesis.

Oh, and that’s pretty darn offensive. This wasn’t a trivial move - we were faced with not treating serious illnesses or me having to quit a job I still miss.

No sh*t, you do what you gotta do. Just like why I don't have a flat screen HDTV and don't do other things I want/like. Life is full of trade offs and the idea that you shouldn't face some because they make you unhappy is pretty damned arrogant considering you want to take money from other people so you can be happy.

Far from a friggin’ TV. This “hey, folks, here’s the new plan, and here’s how much more it’s gonna cost you this year” manuever is all too common in the private sector these days - and it might well be causing more economic friction than simply switching to socialized medicine would.

Yeah, well I see you ignored my link about non-monetary costs associated with socialized medicine. Typical.

And I want a new flat screen HDTV as well.

Oh, and that's pretty darn offensive. This wasn't a trivial move - we were faced with not treating serious illnesses or me having to quit a job I still miss. Far from a friggin' TV. This "hey, folks, here's the new plan, and here's how much more it's gonna cost you this year" manuever is all too common in the private sector these days - and it might well be causing more economic friction than simply switching to socialized medicine would.

I have pointed out that health insurance will cover things like pregnancy and birth and in some cases infertility treatments. These things are not rare, they are often not unexpected, hence they should not be covered by insurance. Oh, and they are expensive.

Pregnancy = cheap compared to heroic interventions. Granted, some of the heroic interventions happen to the newborns that result from those very pregnancies, but most are for the very old. Infertility treatments? Please. If you can find an insurance company that covers that today, I'd like to see it.

Let me see, and why could this be? Could it be what most consider insurance isn’t really insurance as Kling argues?

Kling is wrong and so are you. Car insurance, with its per-event (not per-annum) deductibles matches HMO/PPO plans far more closely than it does the high-annual-deductible HSA-plans that he (maybe you, too) prefer. And for most people, again, the modern HMO/PPO plan simply doesn't cover basic medical care most years due to higher annual deductible and co-pays (per-event deductible).

Kling’s repeating a canard - car insurance is, in fact, pretty similar to HMO/PPO health insurance (and, in fact, very dissimilar to the large deductible plans his ilk favor).

Talk about disingenuous. This patently untrue.

True; but as has been pointed out numerous times, the regular visits to the doctor aren’t, in fact, responsible for most of the cost of health insurance (their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to heroic procedures, and that cost is further marginalized by copays and annual deductibles). The failure of people arguing the HSA (or whatever) case to be honest about where the money is really being spent makes it impossible to have a productive discussion.

I have pointed out that health insurance will cover things like pregnancy and birth and in some cases infertility treatments. These things are not rare, they are often not unexpected, hence they should not be covered by insurance. Oh, and they are expensive.

I’ve worked in high-tech my entire career, and the plans I ‘enjoy’ have eroded the entire time from nominal copays to the point where unless I was seriously sick that year, the insurance company barely paid anything.

Let me see, and why could this be? Could it be what most consider insurance isn't really insurance as Kling argues? Further there are very large subsidies for some of the biggest users of health care. So we see prices going up and up and up, and at the same time the plans start to erode and the wage protion of total compensation stagnates. So the solution is...more subsidies. Great idea! Of course, since this will be unsustainable the government will likely come up with non-monetary ways of curtailing the supply.

The last PPO/HMO-style plan I had had just raised copays for doctors’ visits to something like $35, annual deductible to something like $500, which meant that they basically covered nothing for a reasonably healthy single person. And I had to quit that job because of the benefits change, ironically, since I have a family, and we clearly weren’t very healthy - so there’s your economic friction right there - I left a job I liked, was good at, and was needed at, for a very stupid reason (a couple thousand bucks annually in medical costs).

And I want a new flat screen HDTV as well.

I've worked in high-tech my entire career, and the plans I 'enjoy' have eroded the entire time from nominal copays to the point where unless I was seriously sick that year, the insurance company barely paid anything. (Ironically, the year before I finally got an HSA, I acquired an expensive chronic disease which, on the HSA's first year, blew right threw that $4000 deductible like nobody's business - on one single treatment - so I've been on both sides of this issue, clearly).

The last PPO/HMO-style plan I had had just raised copays for doctors' visits to something like $35, annual deductible to something like $500, which meant that they basically covered nothing for a reasonably healthy single person. And I had to quit that job because of the benefits change, ironically, since I have a family, and we clearly weren't very healthy - so there's your economic friction right there - I left a job I liked, was good at, and was needed at, for a very stupid reason (a couple thousand bucks annually in medical costs).

I know your ideology prevents you from even considering the possibility, but join me: ten years ago I'd have sneered at the thought that socialized medicine might be better than this mess, too. HSA's aren't even close to being an answer - if you're really sick, the deductible is just a speedbump; and otherwise it's just another tax-advantage for the upper-middle-class.

True; but as has been pointed out numerous times, the regular visits to the doctor aren't, in fact, responsible for most of the cost of health insurance (their cost is a drop in the bucket compared to heroic procedures, and that cost is further marginalized by copays and annual deductibles). The failure of people arguing the HSA (or whatever) case to be honest about where the money is really being spent makes it impossible to have a productive discussion.

It may be an 'eat all you can' buffet, but the customer doesn't decide the menu - and your public spenditure is still higher (excel spreadsheet) than ours.

Even if we exclude oil changes, car insurance doesn't pay for blown transmissions, brakes, valve jobs, etc.
It just pays for generally rare events--crashes, thefts, fires, and the like. Medical insurance pays for even routine trips to the doctor and ordinary medications.

Consider the "co-pay" in an HMO/PPO as a small per-event deductible and it becomes evident that car insurance does, in fact, meet this model better - we don't pay an ANNUAL deductible for car repairs like I have to on my HSA plan. If I get in three accidents and need three repairs, I have a deductible for each one, just like I used to on my HMO/PPO plan.

And as others have pointed out, most spending isn't on the preventative stuff that you like to map to "oil changes".

Disingenuous, all around.

Two weeks ago I had an unscheduled trip to the dentist, the result of not looking too closely at what might be lurking in the bottom of that bowl of trail mix. (Whatever it was, it was petrified, and for......