Regulating the Regulator

Health care expenses are irregular.

Insurance was created as a device to regulate these expenses. With insurance, people pay a regular premium into a group pool, which has a contractual obligation to pay for care.

To receive care, people file a legal claim against the pool. These claims are overseen by the local courts. In the United States the claims fall under state jurisdiction.

You can't buy insurance across state lines because insurance is a legal product and doing so confuses jurisdiction.

Insurance is essentially a complex mesh of legal products designed to regulate health care expenses.

The left's call for more regulation of insurance and the right's call for deregulation are both paradoxical because insurance is a regulator.

The whole field of insurance regulation is a dysfunctional mishmash of regulators regulating regulators with law suits pile upon lawsuits with the end result of putting health out the means of working class Americans.

Because insurance is a regulator, calls to deregulate the regulator will never succeed.

The best path for free market health care reform is to revive the traditional concept of self financed health care.

The Medical Savings and Loan is a structured savings program supplemented with loans and grants. In this program, people build equity and use that equity to pay for care (as they did in the days prior to insurance). The program creates a new position called a Health Care Advocate who helps people design their savings plan, maintain records and negotiate prices with local providers.

Transactions in self-funded care are cash payments directly from the patient to doctor.

This removes the court from the doctor's office allowing the doctors concentrate on medicine. The fact that the money is now flowing directly from the patient to doctor restores the pricing mechanism and creates a system of patient centered care.

If you would like to host a meeting on the Medical Savings and Loan, I live in Utah and am able to travel to Colorado, Wyoming, Arizona, Idaho, Nevada, and even to the Soviet Socialist Republic of California.

The program involves a presentation about the Medical Savings and Loan followed by a discussion of group-funded v. self-funded care. I am willing to give the program for free. To pay for my traveling expenses, I've developed a fitness related fundraiser that I would host in conjunction with the presentation.

If you would like to host a program on free market health care reform, Please contact me.