Healthcare, trust and selection: comments on other blogs
I heard somewhere that what people do on blogs is write comments about what other people said on blogs. I guess I do a bit of that, but I'm sure my rate is below average. Therefore time to catch up. In this post I'll look at a couple of interesting points on the American healthcare debate: Megan McArdle looks at rates of insurance among unhealthy people and finds that the adverse selection theory is wrong . But I think there's a serious flaw in her argument. Her finding is that since uninsured people are about as healthy as insured people, adverse selection can't be happening. But she relies on the following assertion: "we would expect the uninsured to be sicker than the general population". I don't think that's correct at all. Surely sick people have far more incentive to get insured than healthy, and so we'd expect the uninsured to be substantially healthier than the average? After all, we would assume that people who don't own cars probabl...