An Interesting Health Care Reform Idea

Clive Crook explains an interesting idea about how to reform the health care system here. Essentially, it would entail providing every citizen with a health care voucher to purchase private insurance (which would have benefits at least at the level that those in Congress receive), and private insurers in turn would be forbidden from rejecting people. This would get rid of the inefficiencies and inequities of the employer-based system, would increase meaningful competition in the insurance marketplace (competition based on providing good results, not based on screening out sicker patients), and would lead to more accountability. In the article, he suggests financing this by a 10% value-added tax. I won't comment on this extensively right now, but I will say that overall there are a lot of positive ingredients in this plan.