Health Reform without Side Effects

Most people are offered health insurance through their jobs, and most still take it. But increasingly large numbers of workers have jobs in which coverage is not offered or where the terms under which it is offered do not induce them to take it. There is, however, an alternative to job-based insurance in which consumers could buy health insurance in the same way as they buy other kinds of insurances: voluntarily, as individual consumers, from private insurance firms. Because many of the uninsured appear to be permanent dropouts from the employment-based system, attention has turned to developing an improved individual insurance scheme.