The Freedom to Pay for Only the Features You Need

After listening to the second McCain-Obama debate the other night, I saw an ad for Progressive.com that promised to reduce your auto insurance premiums by letting you pay for only the features that you need.  It was as though the Invisible Hand had just watched the candidates discussing health care, and quickly whipped off an ad to tell Obama how stupid is his plan to force people to buy insurance coverage that they don't need.

All of which inspired an oped that appears in today's New York Post.  An excerpt:

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to choose the features of your health policy, just like your auto insurance?

John McCain proposes to let you do just that, simply by letting you choose a plan available in another state. With the power to choose a policy regulated by a state with fewer mandated benefits and no community-rating laws, you could knock $1,000 off the price of a $7,000 plan.

This would boost coverage, too: A recent study by economists at the University of Minnesota suggests that McCain's proposal could cover an added 12 million Americans.

But Obama sees choice as dangerous. He fears that "where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings," no insurers would offer such coverage. The New Republic's Jonathan Cohn echoes, "Less cancer screening under McCain's plan? Actually, yes."

Nonsense. California doesn't mandate colon-cancer screening, yet Kaiser Permanente of Northern California is a leader in such research and boasts the most aggressive screening program in the country.

Michigan doesn't mandate prostate or cervical cancer screening, yet six of the University of Michigan's seven insurance offerings cover both. That's where Cohn gets his insurance, so I'll bet him a fancy dinner that he has coverage for both, even without a mandate.

If anyone from my senior-year calculus class is out there (what were there, six of us?), you may recognize the reference to a horrific chapter from my academic career.