If Bob Herbert of the New York Times had read the Show-Me Institute’s primer on health savings accounts, perhaps he would not have written such a pathetic piece about health care, carried in today’s Post-Dispatch. Some of the problems Herbert decries — such as employees losing their health care, and young, healthy people choosing to go without — are already happening now. Increasing the options available for private insurance is an answer to those problems, not a way to make our health care system worse. As for the tax implications, we absolutely should level the playing field between the tax code’s treatment of employer-based plans and individual plans. Why should health care provided by a company be tax exempt as pretax income and individual insurance be classified as after-tax? Reducing the cost of individual plans via a tax credit will encourage insurance plan purchases by more healthy, young people — not fewer.

I guess in the end, though, it comes down to a difference of outlook:

The upshot is that many more Americans — millions more — would find themselves on their own in the bewildering and often treacherous health insurance marketplace.

Herbert, and others like him, think that average people are too stupid to take care of themselves. Needless to day, I disagree.