Helaine Olen, a Washington Post columnist and a member of the “no crisis should go to waste” crowd, argues that the cost of confronting the coronavirus epidemic will make a good case for “Medicare for All.” As an example, she reports on an individual who went to the hospital for a coronavirus test, got an absurd bill for $3,270 and had to pay $1,400 after insurance (Feb. 28, Page A7).

Ms. Olen doesn’t understand that overcharging by hospitals, the lack of price transparency and large surprise bills are the inevitable consequences of the third-party payment system she wants to expand.

She thinks these sorts of problems can be solved by having the government pay for every aspect of health care, a solution which would simply hide the costs and relieve consumers from the need to seek value or for providers to create it. The resulting “free health care” system would be staggeringly expensive, as even Bernie Sanders admits, and the only way to contain costs would be to impose price controls with predictable adverse consequences for the supply of doctors, beds and equipment, wait times for treatment and potentially the quality of care.

Access to affordable care for everyone is a worthy goal, but a plan that eliminates competition, all consumer financial responsibility and every vestige of private insurance isn’t the way to achieve it and would be inferior to the best systems in other countries, which combine private components and government assistance.

Martin Jones

Freeport

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