October 20, 2008 12:11PM # You Want to Cover Everyone with This? By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE I just listened to a fantastic talk that [Mark Smith](http://www.chcf.org/aboutchcf/view.cfm?itemID=108866) of the California Healthcare Foundation gave last month at a [conference](http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/hcast_index.cfm?display=detail&hc=2976) sponsored by the [Center for Health Policy and the Center for Primary Care and Outcomes Research](http://healthpolicy.stanford.edu/) at Stanford University. Here’s an excerpt: > It’s increasingly dysfunctional actually to talk about people in binary fashion as insured or uninsured because there are people with insurance who are going bankrupt.… On the other hand, there are people who are uninsured who are now able to access certain services for less out-of-pocket than people who are insured. > > > It is not clear to me why we pay Aetna $20, so they can pay Medco $15, so they can pay CVS $10, so CVS can collect their $5 copay from us for something we could have just bought at Wal-Mart for $4 in the first place.… > > > Yet our debate in the public space is how can we get everybody into these traditional insurance products…at an increasingly unaffordable rate. Read [the whole thing](http://www.kaisernetwork.org/health_cast/uploaded_files/091608_stanford_part2_transcript.pdf). Smith could be a candidate for the [Anti-Universal Coverage Club](https://www.cato.org/?s=anti-universal+coverage+club). ##### Related Tags [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).