Tag: healthcare bill

The Only Way to Fix Healthcare Insurance in the U.S.

Guest Post by Scott Adams

Our system of government has been amazingly robust for hundreds of years, but it fails when you have these two conditions:

1. An issue is too complicated for the public to understand.

2. Big companies are willing to distort the system for profits.

That situation describes the healthcare debate going on in the United States right now. Our undersized brains can’t grasp all the nuances and implications of any particular healthcare plan. And when our brains are confused, we default to our biases (usually party loyalty) or to whatever metric is simple enough to understand. With healthcare, the one metric that matters is how many people will be covered compared to Obamacare. If the Republican plan covers more people, it will pass. If not, it will fail.

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Why the New Healthcare Bill Will Be a Loser

Guest Post by Scott Adams

People accuse me of imagining that everything President Trump does is brilliant (persuasion-wise) no matter what he does. But I expect the next version of the Republican healthcare bill to be a complete failure. That’s because Republicans seem deeply committed to a losing path, thanks to what might be called the Contrast Problem.

Contrast is the driving principle behind all decisions. You have to know how your options differ, and by how much, or else you have no basis for a decision. President Obama solved for the contrast problem by designing Obamacare to cover more people than before. The rest of the details – especially the costs – were hard to predict, so our brains flushed that noise and focused on the greater number of people covered.

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