If homeowner’s insurance worked like American health insurance, it would not only pay for fires but also cover utility bills, replacing broken appliances, baseballs hit into the window and all the food, drink and paper towels that pass through the kitchen. Certainly, a company could offer an insurance product that covered absolutely every expense of living in a home. But such insurance would be phenomenally expensive and full of ultra-complex rules; the insurer would also acquire an incentive to dream up excuses to deny payment. Just like American health care insurance!

— Gregg Easterbrook, “Tuesday Morning Quarterback”

Politicians seem to live in a two-dimensional world (think C.S. Lewis’ “flatlanders”), while the rest of us are out here in 3D, pleading with them to see features they simply aren’t built to recognize. Put another way, our representatives present us with black and white on health care — Bad Option A, and (totally different but just as) Bad Option B. Thus you have the “public option,” and the “leave it alone” camps battling for supremacy.

(You haven’t heard Republicans saying, explicitly, “leave it alone.” They talk about “sensible reforms” that are supposed to come if the Dems scrap all their current plans and go back to the drawing board. This is kind of like me saying, “Sure, I’ll exercise more, just as soon as I start getting enough sleep the nights before.” In other words, it ain’t gonna happen.)

Leave it to a football column to provide a far better alternative. In his “Tuesday Morning Quarterback” article at ESPN.com, Gregg Easterbrook takes a break from dissecting plays and mocking the punt — no, he says, it is NOT that risky to try on fourth down — to present a quite cogent and perfectly simple argument: Insurers should face price-controls, and providers should have to offer non-insured individuals the same pricing they offer insurance companies. (More quotes after the jump.) (more…)