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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (134324)	3/23/2010 10:28:42 AM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542959

Off the top of my head on the less liberty side: Choice of providers. Choice in type, content, and price of policy. I would put this on the "more liberty" side. What choice do most people have right now? The choice is determined by the institution they work for. Now the insurance exchanges will give people more choices than that. Especially w/r/t "type, content and price of policy." Available treatments and other health products I don't see this as necessarily following from hcr. For one thing, it won't do anything to constrain the myriad alternative medical remedies that are available today that insurance doesn't pay for. I don't see "fewer treatments and other health products" as always a bad thing--so many of them simply don't work as advertised and are found after being on the market for a few years to have negative side effects due to inadequate testing (or companies essentially paying for the results they want and/or fudging them). And higher taxes, as Mankiw mentioned. I suppose you could say that higher taxes constrains freedom because you will have less money. But one could ask: would taxes be higher than what the taxes theoretically would have been plus the increase in cost of medical insurance/care if those costs are allowed to increase at the rate they have been increasing? This involves doing counterfactuals that are always suspect at best.