Healthcare Insurance: America’s Collective Action Nightmare
Across the country, ugly confrontations are occurring between Republican lawmakers who pledged to repeal Obamacare and Americans who are afraid of losing their healthcare coverage. The protesters’ fears are understandable. The cost of medical services can be devastating. The chief selling point for Obamacare was that, between the guarantee of coverage on the exchanges and the expansion of Medicaid, the vast majority of Americans would be protected. And the main difficulty that Republicans face in repealing Obamacare is the widespread concern that tens of millions of people might be tossed off the rolls.The confrontations are the unavoidable consequence of a collective action dilemma. The dilemma is this: To achieve good collective outcomes, government must often prevent people from doing what they think is best for themselves. Individually, I might like to be free to dump trash in the most convenient place, to pollute the waterways and skies, to fish and hunt without limit, to drink and drive, or to use other people’s property and possessions without their permission. Millions of other people might want these liberties too. But collectively, we’re all vastly better off when everyone’s freedom to do these things is constrained. One of the benefits of government is that it can prevent people from acting in ways that are individually rational but that, when practiced widely, make us collectively worse off.
