Stossel: Why Obama's Health Plan Gets It Wrong

Aug. 27, 2009 — -- President Barack Obama says insurance companies make you pay too much for health care. He wants the government to "limit how much you can be charged for out-of-pocket expenses."

Sounds great -- just make the insurance companies pay more, and then health care will become affordable. After all, that's what insurance is for, right?

No. When insurance companies pay the tab for everything -- down to flu shots and sprained ankles -- it makes health care more expensive for everyone. Why? Because when someone else pays for your health care, you aren't likely to ask, or even care, how much it costs.

When I blogged about how insurance makes health care costs explode, Mark Horn, a father of four from North Carolina, told me that insurance makes it impossible for him to shop around for the best prices.

Horn cares about costs because has a high-deductible health plan. Before his insurance company will pay, he must spend $5,000 out of pocket. So, if his son has a fever, he has an incentive to find out which doctor will charge the least for an office visit.

But Mark says "the physician himself never knows" the cost of anything. "So, they may refer me to the front desk, but they usually don't know the cost either. Every other service that I use, they tell me what it costs. But, with health care, it's not like that. It's just a crapshoot, and the reason is because somebody else is paying for it."

Dr. Melvin Gerald, also from North Carolina, knows firsthand how patients stop caring about costs when someone else pays. "The patients who have insurance ... some of them tell you, 'Do this, do that,' and some of the things they don't need to have done," he says. But because insurance pays, they don't care.

There is plenty of research to support the idea that when patients pay less out of pocket, they overuse health care. In fact, the RAND Corporation conducted a 15-year study that showed "that modest cost sharing reduces use of services with negligible effects on health for the average person." But all we hear from Washington is that insurance should cover more.

With insurance companies so tied to American expectations of how to pay for health care, it's no surprise that costs keep going up. America spent $2.2 trillion on healthcare in 2007, more than triple the $714 billion spent in 1990, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

But there is one area of health care where costs are going down. Laser vision correction surgery, or LASIK, is almost never covered by insurance, and keeps getting cheaper.