Saturday, October 06, 2007

Against the Individual Mandate

I have an op-ed in the new (October 15th) issue of Business Week. It's adapted from my longer article for Cato Policy Report, taking on the increasingly popular idea (shared by Clinton, Edwards, Romney, and Schwarzenegger) of mandating the purchase of health insurance.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hi Glen,

I am using your Cato article as a reference for arguing against the individual mandate in Colorado. Nice work!

In the Cato article you write: "So how much uncompensated care is received by the uninsured? The same study puts the number at about $35 billion a year in 2001, or only 2.8 percent of total health care expenditures for that year."

Can you provide the link the specific Urban Institute study? There are many at Urban.org, and I have not been able to find it.

Also, are you familiar with this study in the journal Medical Care titled "Characteristics of Occasional and Frequent Emergency Department Users: Do Insurance Coverage and Access to Care Matter?" It concludes: "The uninsured and the privately insured adults have the same risk of being frequent users, but publicly insured adults are 2.08 times more likely to be frequent users." (I can't remember where I first saw this.)