Bigger Pizzas: A Capitalist Case for Health Care Reform

good morning Hank it's Tuesday I want to return to the subject of America's fascinating the inefficient health care system and I want to make a capitalist argument for reform but first a brief defense of capitalism ok so think of the economy as a pizza the richest people get the largest portion of that pizza and the poorest people get very little of it in fact in the u.s. the poorest 40% of Americans get less than 0.3% of the pizza that's problematic don't get me wrong but the cool thing about capitalism is that thanks to innovation and competition over time the overall size of the pizza increases so even if your percentage slice of the pie doesn't increase you get more pizza this is ultimately why you probably live in a place with a refrigerator and your great-grandparents probably didn't essentially Hank over time free markets create free pizza well it's not free actually because innovation usually means like increased use of non-renewable resources and new damage to the ecosystem but what are free pizza but and this is very important the only way to get that free pizza is to make the world safe for innovation and competition like you need innovators to create refrigerators and then you need competition to drive the prices down besides creating free pizza this also creates lots of jobs so yeah unfortunately our healthcare system sucks at facilitating this ok so in the United States most people get their insurance through their employers like the vast majority of companies with more than 50 employees offer health insurance plans that's how my family and I get our health insurance through my wife's job but if you or your spouse don't work for a big company it can be difficult to get insurance at all because insurers can deny people access to coverage based on past health problems called pre-existing conditions and this can lead to all kinds of irrationality because people don't want to risk this pre-existing condition stuff so they either stay at their job with a big company or they remain full-time students because those ways you're guaranteed to have health insurance example in 2008 Henry Wright graduated from college which meant he no longer had insurance so he figured he should enroll in graduate school in physics so he could keep his insurance even though what he really wanted to do was do you to be stuff fortunately for Henry at that very moment the Affordable Care Act came along saying that he was entitled to be on his parent's insurance until he was 26 and that allowed him to go work for a tiny online video company which in turn led to the creation of minutephysics and minute earth-2 of the most innovative educational projects on the internet telling us everything from what a Higgs boson is to Y locusts plagues happen those projects have been watched hundreds millions of times and they make us smarter but they also increase the size of the pizza but crazily if it hadn't been for this weird rule in the Affordable Care Act that you get to keep your parent's insurance until you're 26 none of it would have happened let me give you another example you and by you I mean my brother angry and I don't mean the other people watching this video although hi Hank you have altered of colitis a chronic and very serious illness that's also extremely expensive to treat so no insurance company will ever choose to insure you now thanks to the state of Montana you currently have a so-called catastrophic coverage plan which caps your out-of-pocket health expenses at ten thousand dollars per year that's not ideal but before Montana passed that law you couldn't get any health insurance at all meaning that you were constantly at risk of like a million dollar bankrupting illness or injury so Hank back before this government subsidized health care plan came along you had to allocate every dollar you made to the I don't want to go bankrupt if I fall off a ladder fund but then when the state of Montana came along and forced insurance companies to at least offer catastrophic coverage to people like you you could suddenly use your resources more efficiently basically you could take all that gosh I don't want to fall off a ladder money and start spending it on other stuff like I don't know dftba records which now employs lots of people or you could spend money to start VidCon which now also employs lots of people then there's the Lizzie Bennet diaries and crash course and scishow and sexplanations and the brain scoop and the foundation to decrease worldsuck and subbable and the juggernaut known as 2d glasses Hank all together these investments that you've made an innovation are responsible for dozens of jobs and for a significant growing of the overall size of the pizza and none of that could have ever happened without publicly subsidized health insurance now of course Hank could have gone to work for a big company after college and it could have gotten health insurance but then there would be no nerdfighteria no VidCon no dftba records etc career decisions should be about finding the place where your talents meet the world's needs not about finding the place where you can get health insurance okay so this all took a hilarious turn recently when Henry turned 26 and aged out of his parents health care coverage he then had to apply for his own insurance and sure enough he was turned down because of the pre-existing conditions of tinnitus and tendonitis that's right he has a little bit of ringing in his ear occasionally and his knee gets sore because he runs a lot because he's so frakking healthy now of course on January 1st 2014 Henry will be eligible for coverage as everyone else will be through the Affordable Care Act but if that didn't exist he would be forced to choose between minutephysics and his health that is a ridiculous choice and that ridiculous choice has lived by tens of millions of Americans has inhibited innovation prevented job creation and it has made the pizza smaller than it ought to be heck there are only a few things that really pissed me off in this world and one of them is small pizzas so that's my capitalist fiscally conservative case for health care reform for too long we have privileged employees over entrepreneurs when we need entrepreneurs like Henry and Hank to maximize economic growth Hank thank you for being the engine that drives job growth in the American economy and for giving lots of people jobs including me I will see you on Friday informational videos are allowed to be more than four minutes long the whole time dang it sorry you saw the secret innards of the set which is really just my desk

Channel: vlogbrothers

Views: 643,996

Keywords: Capitalism (Idea), Health Care (Issue), news, politics, health care, congress, illness, hospitals, john green, nerdfighters, finance, economics, health care reform, reform, government, governance, analysis

Id: R7LF5Vj2n64

Length: 5min 26sec (326 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 03 2013