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The individual mandate is moot in this system, as everyone will have money they can only spend on insurance. Benefit caps are a really tricky issue. As a soci

The individual mandate is moot in this system, as everyone will have money they can only spend on insurance. Benefit caps are a really tricky issue. As a society, are we willing to spend a million dollars to extend life for a week? Probably not. On the other hand, do you cut off a cancer patient after a million? Probably not. But there has to be a rational way to balance this without people freaking out over 'death-panels'. I agree, universal coverage means vastly more money spent. Therefore, coverage for major issues is the baseline amount, not the Obamacare standards where people generally have way more insurance than they would choose. The closest proposal I've seen is tax credits for this.

neltnerb 10y ago
If they can only spend the EBI on insurance, it's a fixed health care subsidy or tax credit depending on how you frame it. I may simply be confused though, because every example I know of for EBI means "unrestricted base income". Can we just call it something other than EBI if you're talking about restricting how it is spent? In any event, if I understand you, it's a fixed amount per person. That doesn't seem like it does much to address the moral imperative of guaranteeing affordable health care if sick people are on much more expensive health care plans or if the available affordable plans don't cover what they need. So you'd have to offer varying amounts depending on need, in order to meet that moral imperative. And once you're talking about varying the amount, it is not very close to what I think you're describing. Is there some way to reconcile these ideas and constraints that I'm missing? Because I suspect Congress would love to hear it...