Monday night the handwringing discussion among Finance Committee Democrats was how to we make insurance affordable. Unless someone can convince them on short order that they are asking the wrong question, we are doomed to many more years of ever-increasing insurance rates and deficit spending to support a public health system. In a meeting in Seattle yesterday, Jack Ablin, Chief Investment Officer for Harris Private Bank, described the problem with the perfect analogy. If you go to dinner with a group, which situation results in a higher bill - when everyone pays their own bill or when you split the bill. That's why insurance rates keep going up every year.

The correct question that legislators need to be asking is how to make health care affordable. The answer is to let the people who use it (all of us) pay for it, or at least a lot of it, at the point we use it. The answer is not to set up a tragedy of the commons system (insurance) and then compound it by backing it up with another tragedy of the commons system (congress with taxing authority but no requirement to balance the budget).