Do I need coverage from my food insurance every time I take a trip to Trader Joe's, Chipotle, or even Walmart? There is every reason for flu shots to be cheap e

Do I need coverage from my food insurance every time I take a trip to Trader Joe's, Chipotle, or even Walmart? There is every reason for flu shots to be cheap enough that they don't require a special mechanism of payment. Yes, vaccine is delicate and it must be handled with care ... but the same is true for most foods and many other necessities that we somehow manage to buy and sell without an insurer butting in. The goal has to be making medicine work like everything else we buy, including the daily non-negotiables like food, water, clothing, and energy resources. There's no reason medicine shouldn't or can't work that way in the general case. But as long as we make it about moving numbers around so that Group X is slightly less inconvenienced by this farce, we're playing their game. We need to be talking about how to break their stranglehold, and I don't think just "move it into the government so we can get installed as bureaucrats, who are even harder to get rid than executives!" is necessarily a great macro-scale response (though I continue to believe it's better than doing nothing). I don't suggest taking anything from anyone who is actually involved in the thing here. The only people I want to take out of the equation are the pencil-pushers leeching gargantuan quantities of otherwise-useful time and money away from the public. That so many people find it so difficult to conceive of routine medical care without an insurance carrier of some type is a testament to the work we have ahead of us.