What a Subway Breast-Implant Ad Can Teach Us About U.S. Health Care
12th December 2016
If there’s anything American capitalism is really good at, after all—for better or worse—it’s figuring out ways for consumers to pay for things that they otherwise couldn’t afford, and may not even need. That new iPhone? Pay for it over two years in connection with your cellphone service contract. A new house? How about a 30-year mortgage, or even an interest-only adjustable rate mortgage? A new car? Lease it for three years. College tuition? Try a section 529 tax-deferred savings account, student loans, and financial aid.
Leave cancer or diabetes aside for the moment. With all due respect to Professor Gawande, Harvard, and the New Yorker, it’s just hard for me to believe that in the absence of Obamacare, the expense of pregnancy will suddenly become out of reach to ordinary Americans. Somehow, hundreds of millions of Americans managed to become pregnant in the more than two centuries that the republic existed before 2010, when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was passed. If the law is repealed, we’ll find a way to reproduce again afterward.