Filet mignon, pinot noir and an MRI

That was the title of an opinion piece I read the other day in the Statesman Journal. The author compares a restaurant owner’s woes with “mandatory food insurance” and Massachusetts’ new health care policy that will cover 460,000 uninsured residents by July. The author makes an absurd comparison because he reduces the complex problems with our nation’s current health care system to simple platitudes such as the following:

• The nation would be better served if America’s lawmakers stopped piling more regulations onto a (health care) system that’s absurdly overregulated.
• Deregulate health insurance and hospitals so that we could shop for the precise care we need; that would improve quality and lower costs.
• Health care needs more choice, not more coercion.

Today, 45 million Americans lack health insurance because they can’t afford it and millions more a struggling to pay their premiums as their benefits shrink. The health-care-is-just-like-food people assume that health care is just like a consumer good but it’s not. Deregulation won’t solve America’s health care crisis; finding a solution to the crisis is the great moral challenge of our time.