My homeowner insurance doesn't cover the cost when my gutters need cleaning, and my car insurance doesn't cover the cost when I need to fill the tank with gas. Instead, the policies cover only catastrophic events, like my house burning down or a major accident. Now that the Obama administration has fixed the health insurance system, I trust they will soon move on to solve these other problems.Indeed, this is pretty much the entirety of his post on the subject. This, to me, is exactly the problem with some common analyses of the health insurance debate. Equating health coverage to something similar (ie auto or homeowner insurance), conflates the facts. Preferences in the health care industry simply do not operate in the way we traditionally view them. Consumers often are not armed with a sufficient amount of information to make constructive decisions that reflect their underlying aims. Often, the consumer of health care is not even the party making such a decision.
But I am admittedly ill-informed in policy matters relating to health care and the economics of related institutions. However, the way I see it, if we are to take Mankiw's comparison at face-value, we find a number of flaws. The homeowner does not die if s/he fails to clean out the gutters every so often. The owner of an automobile does not lose a limb if s/he doesn't keep up with routine maintenance. The sickly consumer of health care, however, is faced with such dire straits. To me, herein lies the key difference between health care and any other industry; the consumer cannot simply "opt out" of participation in this market.
