I do differentiate when abortion is a medical necessity, such as your examples. That’s precisely the point I wanted to make — that abortion in most cases has nothing to do with a woman’s “reproductive health” any more than liposuction has to do with someone’s mental health. Insisting it be included in required health care packages, as Meg does, seems to me to be wasteful. But I realize that the reason has to do with the politics of the abortion debate, NOT the economics of health insurance. Pro-choice advocates fight and (he cynically observed) fundraise based on advocating for abortion’s coverage under Medicaid, international family planning monies, etc. It’s political, not economic.

I agree with you, that conservatives believe people should be free to choose the coverage they want, at the price they want. Government intrusion into the normal economic activity surrounding this is doomed to fail because the government is slow, biased, bureaucratic, and obsessed with equity. The “free market” simply means letting competition among providers flow into more and more areas of this economic sector. Think of how the cost for laser eye surgery, which is almost never covered by employers’ eye care insurance, has fallen in the last several years. That’s a great thing to aspire to.

You’re right to think that for-profit companies have the patient’s interest less in mind than their own profitability. Except that the difference is that they have competitors who would steal business from them in a competitive market for providing lousy coverage or bad customer service. This, after all, is what we mean when we talk about “the free market.” The government almost never responds to people’s needs in the same way. That’s why the horror stories about socialized medicine from Canada and UK matter, because they all tell the story of a slow-footed, inflexible bureaucracy.

As for your second point, that “conservatives have been saying all along that if you set up a health care system run by the government, you will have bureaucrats making medical decisions for people whose best interests they do not have at heart.” Actually, I believe the conservatives’ point is that people are better at having their own best interests at heart and that bureaucrats should stay out of the way. But they say that against the obvious success of programs like Medicare, without which millions of seniors would not have healthcare at all. Joe, unless you are prepared to forgo your right to Medicare when the time comes, a government program designed and administered by government bureaucrats, your broad dismissal of their intentions and abilities flies in the face of logic.

By dismissing bureaucrats, you imply that for-profit companies or the free market are better guardians of people’s best interests? Please. We’ve seen time and again that entities and mechanisms that exist for the sole purpose of financial gain are machines to generate money, that do not have hearts at all let alone any awareness of any living thing’s best interests.

Second point I can’t resist making: conservatives have been saying all along that if you set up a health care system run by the government, you will have bureaucrats making medical decisions for people whose best interests they do not have at heart. Here, ironically, is a CLASSIC example of just that fact. So, can you now understand a little better why conservatives have been able to score points against government-run health care by pointing out that it means that medical decisions will be made by “faceless bureaucrats?” That is precisely what you’re trying to prevent here.