PolicyGuy

Monday, June 30, 2003


Save Now for Medical Expenses
Writing in National Review, philosopher Michael Novak proposes a simple way of dealing with medical expenses in old age: parents should set up an account--to be untouched for 65 years--to pay for the child's medical expenses in old age.
If I have done my arithmetic correctly, $1,000 invested at birth for each newborn American child would at 7 percent annual growth amount to $128,000 at age 65. It would seem to me that at that age, that amount of money would buy a lot of catastrophic medical insurance until the end of each citizen's life (for big-ticket items), with a little left over for ordinary health-insurance co-payments.
I suppose that this may even--if we will have a government program of some sort--be implemented by the government (federal, most likely) taking that $1,000 from money taken from other taxpayers and sticking that into an account for the newborn: Pay a little now, or much later.

Ok, so it's not exactly constitutional. And if you expect a government fund to remain untapped for 65 years, you simply haven't heard P.J. O'Rourke's comments about whisky, cars, and teenaged boys.

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"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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