What This Is, Need Not Be

There is something so terminally exhausting about our “healthcare” debate, which rests primarily on a deeply stupid and economically illiterate set of assumptions—namely that insurance coverage for routine and pre-planned medical expenses is a necessary part of our economy. It is not—or rather, it need not be the case. But that seems to be the only framework in which we can debate “healthcare,” by which we generally mean “health insurance,” but which actually means “expensive co-payment plan for things that would be much cheaper if we just paid for them out-of-pocket.”

This is a brutally simple and easy-to-understand argument, which is presumably why everyone—politicians, normal citizens, liberal, conservative, moderate, everyone—ignores it. We have been trained to believe that the healthcare economy is some kind of magical alternate-universe industry in which the normal economic principles don’t apply. “Under [the Graham-Cassidy bill],” writes Hawaiian senator Brian Schatz, “pregnancy will cost you an extra 17K.”

Readers, Daniel Payne is here to tell you that this financial figure is, to put it delicately, complete and utter bullsh**t. I don’t mean the price tag—I am certain that our idiot medical system cheerfully charges new mothers tens of thousands of dollars to give birth. I mean, rather, the perceived immutability of the price tag, the idea that, without legislative intervention and subsidized insurance, pregnancy and childbirth are financially-ruinous endeavors.

They are not. This is simply fact. For the birth of our first, my wife and I shelled out around $5,000, all told—that’s prenatal, birth, and postpartum combined. This, mind you, was entirely out-of-pocket..

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