As the passion starts to build for health care reform this summer, I’ve tried to remind us to be cautious and deliberative in our thinking. Others seem to be advising similar caution. In John Goodman’s Health Blog warns us against rushing to entitlements, overly broad mandated benefits, installing perverse financial incentives, and public programs that encourage people to drop private health care coverage. Goodman also has authored a paper “Applying the ‘Do No Harm’ Principle to Health Policy” in the Journal of Legal Medicine expanding on these points.
In promoting his “Do No Harm” approach in his paper, Goodman advocates for government policies that foster an economic “neutrality” when it comes to encouraging public versus private coverage, group versus individual insurance, and third-party versus self-insurance. Goodman makes a lot of sense in his proposed fine tuning of the American health care system. I hope we see more evidence of this kind of thinking in the days ahead.
