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Consenting adults should be allowed to enter into peaceful, voluntary relationships with each other. This includes the right to enter into contractual agreements.
If an insurance company wants to offer a policy that does not cover mental health, and a customer is willing to buy such a policy, then that should be legal. Bush wants such a policy to be outlawed.
Here are three paragraphs from the article:
"Bush did not endorse any specific legislation, but he promised to work with Republican Sen. Pete Domenici of New Mexico who was at his side. Domenici, whose daughter suffers from mental illness, has long championed federally enforced parity guaranteeing that insurance for mental health disorders is as comprehensive as that offered for other illnesses."
"The far-reaching bill offered by Domenici and Sen. Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, would require federally mandated parity. The U.S. Senate is expected to vote on it within the next few weeks."
"For instance, a patient could not have a $5 co-pay for a cholesterol drug but have a $50 co-pay for an antidepressant drug. Nor could a patient have unlimited doctor's visits for, say, diabetes but have a cap on how many times a mental health provider could be seen."
Supporters of this kind of thing seem to assume that the coverage for mental disorders will be expanded to equal that of physical disorders. That may happen. But it's also possible that coverage of physical disorders will be reduced to equal the level that covers mental disorders. So, for example, the $5 co-pay for the cholestoral drug may be increased to $50. And maybe they will start to set limits on how many times the diabestes patient can see the doctor in a given year. Or, maybe the mental coverage will increase and the physical coverage will decrease, and the two will meet somewhere in between. I can't predict which of these possibilities will result from the legislation.
But whatever happens, the result will be that people will have less choice over how they spend their money.
In a fantasyland, every person would have 100% coverage for 100% of their health care needs. But in the real world, that's not possible, and so there are tradeoffs. So the question then becomes: who should decide what these tradeoffs are? Should George Bush and other politicians be making these decisions, or, should each individual person, each with his own unique set of priorities and desires, be free to make his own decision?
One of the big problems is that the government has rigged the tax laws to make it so that most people get their health insurance from their employer. That's just bad policy. Imagine if your employer also had the ability to determine your housing, your food, your clothing, your recreation, etc.
If the federal government must be involved in insurance, then they should change the tax code so that it no longer discriminates against medical savings accounts. Medical savings acounts allow patients to get any type of health service that they want, whether it be for physical or mental illness, from any health provider, without any restrictions on these choices. The problem is that the tax code currently discriminates against this kind of thing. This discrimination should be ended.
Medical savings accounts involve a tradeoff. If your spending on health care during the year is less than a certain amount, then at the end of the year, you get to keep any money in the account that you didn't spend. This tradeoff is a good thing, beause it encourages people to realize that using health care really does have a cost.
The way that the tax code discriminates right now is that these accounts are taxed, while the "regular" type of employer provided health insurance is not taxed. This kind of tax discrimination should be brought to an end.
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