Ed Dolan: The political situation you can look at it as either half full or half empty. He says the biggest discouragement is something I call Reinhardt's law, which is that every dollar of healthcare waste is a dollar of income for some healthcare provider. But he also sees encouragement in trying to promote universal catastrophic care.
Economist Ed Dolan of the Niskanen Center talks about employer-based health insurance with EconTalk host Russ Roberts. Dolan discusses how unusual it is relative to other countries that so many Americans get their health insurance through their employer and the implications of that phenomenon for the structure of the health insurance market. Dolan explores the drawbacks of this structure and makes the case for what he calls Universal Catastrophic Coverage.