Thursday, October 07, 2010

TPM on Paul on Deductibles

TPM is having a merry old time with Rand Paul for insisting on the idea of a $2,000 Medicare deductible.  I suppose they are right that it's bad politics (though perhaps not quite as bad as they seem to perceive?).  But I'd like to know is how many self-conceived left-leaning economists also support the idea, or some close variant thereof.  Economists like incentives and deductibles are one way of marrying incentives to an insurance scheme.  Needless to say I'm not going to do the work myself, but if someone were to comb through all the high-priced textbooks of high-priced econ profs, I bet they'd find a lot of support for deductible-type incentives and very little opposition thereto.

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