Health Insurance and Car Insurance

In a recent interview Glorious Leader compares car insurance to health insurance. Behold these gems of liberal inconsistency:

"We've got to make sure that everybody has some kind of insurance -- the same way that they have car insurance."

"We [must] make sure that insurance companies have to provide care to people with pre-existing conditions,...[our plan] makes sure that that insurance company can't discriminate against you if you've got pre-existing conditions."

"When it comes to car insurance, we wouldn't say that you can wait until you get into a car wreck and then you can go to the insurance company, say hey, I want to buy some insurance for my car"

Let's do a comparison of these two types of insurance that's based on reality, not good intentions.

• First off, Obama is wrong when he says that "we require" that individuals purchase automobile insurance. The requirments to purchase automobile insurance falls under state regulation, not the federal government.


• The only insurance we are required to purchase - liability insurance - is for the protection of others, not ourselves. This alone invalidates any comparison between automobile insurance and health insurance.


• There is no requirement to purchase insurance at all unless one participates in the voluntary activity of driving on public roads. If you drive only on private roads, or don't drive at all, there's no requirement to obtain a driver's license or purchase insurance.


• Automobile insurance is designed to cover only major claims. People file automobile insurance claims only in the event of significant damage or loss. But people file significant health insurance claims for events as minor as the flu.


• Automobile insurance doesn't pay for basic maintainence, oil changes, tire rotations, and such. That's one reason that insurance is relatively affordable. The new health car plan wants insurers to pay for our basic health maintainence, which will make that insurance more expensive.


• Another reason that automobile insurance is relatively affordable is that insurers can compete across state lines. That means that comparable policies from the major vendors are comparable in price. That's not the case with health insurance. The lack of competition is one reason that comparable insurance plans in different states can vary dramatically in price.


• The cost of automobile insurance is associated with risk, accessed by both your individual record and by membership in certain groups that are statistically associated with high risk. If your driving record is good and you make few claims, you aren't much of a risk and your insurance is relatively inexpensive. And if you're an eighteen-year-old male, you're going to pay more for insurance even if you're a safe driver. But the new health plan wishes to force insurers to ignore risk and cover everyone at comparable rates.

But the greatest inconsistency in Obama's statments have to do with prior conditions. Dispite his claim to the contrary, forcing health insurance companies to accept new clients with prior conditions is exactly the same as forcing automobile insurers to accept new clients who just wrecked their car - and then paying for repairs.

Health insurance should be like automobile insurance in some ways: a policy priced on risk to protect you from major events. But liberals want to transform the insurance industry into socialized medicine, in which everyone contributes to a common pot and draws from that what they need. This is an economic policy that has never worked, anywhere or anytime it has been tried. It won't work now either.

Hat tips to Doug Ross and Ed Morrissey