National Health Care Musings

When the cost of engaging in risky behaviors is reduced, people engage in more risky behavior. This has been shown to be true, even adjusting for previous behavior, income, education, etc, etc. This is an aspect of the "Free Rider" problem. Basically, when people get health insurance, they go sky diving more often.

So if we get universal health care in the United States, there should be some increased number of fatalities because of risky behavior.

One of the arguments for national health care is that it would make our companies more competitive by transferring the cost of health care away from to the companies and to the government, an advantage other countries currently have.

Currently in the United States, whenever there is an OSHA recordable accident the company must pay a fine roughly equal to ten times the medical cost of the accident. If this were to be changed companies would loose an incentive to prevent accidents because someone else would be picking up the tab.

http://www.who.int/quantifying_ehimpacts/methods/en/takala.pdf

Using information on this site, the EU has 6.6 deaths due to occupational accidents per USA's 5.3 deaths. The USA has 6600 Occupational deaths per year.

Using an VERY spitball methodology, national American healthcare could cause about 1,000 additional Occupational deaths per year. Roughly the cost of the Iraq war at it's worst.

I tried to extend my search to find accidental death rates in the USA vs the EU, but came up empty in the 2.3 minutes I dedicated to the search.

It is not my intention to dis national health care in this post. I'm just thinking out loud. It deserves better debate. I'll dis it in another, better thought out post.