Martin Hoke: “You are absolutely right. I will give you two examples where the insurance industry has not really taken over payment of…”

“You are absolutely right. I will give you two examples where the insurance industry has not really taken over payment of bills that are medically related, so you do not have third party payment, you actually have the consumer directly involved. Those two areas are dental and optical. And I will just give the optical example. What happened there is really quite instructive and very impressive in terms of what a free market can do. You found two things: No. 1 is that the number of choices in and the avenues that Americans have with respect to getting eye care and eye wear are really quite varied. You can go to an optometrist, and optician, or you can go to an ophthalmologist. There are three levels of care and training. All of those are available, and three different prices. You can go to almost any mall in this country and have a pair of glasses made in an afternoon. The price of glasses has on an inflation-adjusted basis remained flat for several decades. The price of contact lenses has dropped dramatically over that same period of time. This is an area that has not been picked up by and large as a benefit because clearly it does not have really any insurance function. The truth is that insurance is supposed to protect people against catastrophic losses due to unforeseen circumstances. But that is not what our health insurance does. What our health insurance does is it is actually a prepaid health care plan.”