Peter Schiff (via Moneynews - Schiff: Healthcare Fix Is Simple)

an interesting suggestion. what say you, tumblrs?

(via hilker)

This was something I used to endorse (as recently as a couple days ago). Actually, I still do, but there is recent evidence that it won’t be terribly effective. See these posts on pet health care costs [1], [2]. They’ve been rising at roughly the same rate as human health care costs. Pet health care doesn’t have the same set of tax laws (or insurance laws) as human health care.

It’s possible that pet health care costs have gone up just because human health care costs have gone up and there’s some sort of sympathetic value. I mean, if you spend twice as much putting a cast on your kid as before, why shouldn’t you be willing to pay twice as much for Fido? Also, it’s possible that the base costs are linked. Can a company manufacturing pet health care products also manufacture human health care products? If so, you’d expect the pet health care prices to rise at the same rate. In my opinion, both of these arguments are a little weak (heck, I don’t even know if they are plausible … anyone know anything about this industry?).

This isn’t exactly an argument against such policies. Nothing that has been used to explain the rapid rise in human health care costs can explain the rise in pet health care costs, either.