Medical Care

This article has some great insights into Medical Care. For example,

"Employer financing of medical care has caused the term insurance to acquire a rather different meaning in medicine than in most other contexts. We generally rely on insurance to protect us against events that are highly unlikely to occur but that involve large losses if they do occur—major catastrophes, not minor, regularly recurring expenses. We insure our houses against loss from fire, not against the cost of having to cut the lawn. We insure our cars against liability to others or major damage, not against having to pay for gasoline. Yet in medicine, it has become common to rely on insurance to pay for regular medical examinations and often for prescriptions.This is partly a question of the size of the deductible and the co-payment, but it goes beyond that. 'Without medical insurance' and 'without access to medical care' have come to be treated as nearly synonymous."

And that is just as true today as it was when this was written six years ago. Now, however, we have proposals for national health care which put that error into practice.