Jimmy Kimmel is getting some flack from Republicans for his tearful plea to leave the Affordable Care Act alone. Here’s a choice quote. I’m not making this up:

Do supposedly smart people know how the healthcare system worked/works in this country? Forget that. Do these people know how insurance works?

You all pay into a pot and then when somebody gets sick you draw from the pot. Everybody puts in a little, and that goes to pay for OTHER PEOPLE’S care. For God’s sake, folks, it’s not that hard. You don’t pay for your own healthcare – you never did – under the old system, under the new system. NEVER. You think your little monthly employee/employer health insurance deduction covers your cancer? Try doing the math. You’re not paying into your own personal fund.

Why would it better to pool our risk at the Federal Government level instead of with private companies? Well, now that’s a decent question. The best answer I can come up with is that profit has a tendency to distort the market for certain demand locked (inelastic) markets. Bottom line, you need some ER treatment, you can’t price shop. You need it when you need it, and with certain exceptions (like waiting until you’re critical to go to the hospital), you don’t really have much choice over where you go, how much you pay, and what care you get. Everybody wants the best. Everybody wants it now. It’s your life. If you let a private corporation enter into the equation with a profit motive, they have an incentive to reduce supply of quality healthcare and increase price. They try cheaper treatments before more effective ones. They limit what they cover (preexisting conditions), they raise prices and co-pays so that you will not select that treatment or perhaps not even go to the doctor.

That sounds like a bureaucracy run amok or even better, it sounds like a death panel – a private, monopolistic, beholden to no one except their shareholders death panel.

If, however, healthcare is run as a public service with the profit motive removed, we can at least see how it might reduce costs while still providing effective services.

And as a side benefit, do you have any idea how much of the healthcare industry is dedicated to billing? Let doctors and nurses do their work – the work they were trained to do, the work they like to do, and leave the billing, chasing invoices, collections, and dealing with insurance companies behind.

At the end of the day though, you have always been paying for other people’s healthcare. Wouldn’t you like to pay less?