Health Reform and Tax Reform

Maybe it’s a stretch, but I think that conceptually there is a parallel here. If we had to all of a sudden pay all of our taxes in one big check at the end of the year, I think people would be a lot more focused on taxes. How much they are? How they are calculated? But, we pay each paycheck (or at least most of us), and the impact is muted.

Even if employers simply transferred the dollars to us and we bought individual insurance through our employer to get the group discount, we would still be writing the monthly checks and be much more sensitive to the costs and what we get for our money. Today, those of us still lucky enough to have group health insurance often don’t realize the true cost of an office visit, a surgery, a medication, or any of the other things we use.