Links about health care reform

The subject of the day. I don't have a lot to say about it, so I'll simply offer links.

1. What I said 2 and a half years ago still reads well to my own biased eyes.

2. Here is something along analogous lines, that Ronald Bailey wrote back in 2003.

3. But let's be more up-to-date for a moment. Here is something from the folks at Cato, who are watching all this with some more particularity than I am.

4. Julian Sanchez reminds us that insurance is about managing risks. If health insurers aren't allowed to manage risks (by for example protecting themselves against liability for pre-existing conditions) then whatever exactly it is that they are doing, it is no longer insurance as that term has always been understood.

5. It does seem to be an odd but empirically observable fact that in some fields low-risk people purchase more insurance than do high-risk people.

6. Virginia Postrel tells us about her life, her breast cancer diagnosis of 2007, and what she makes of it in terms of health insurance as an industry.

7. On the intra-party split the Democrats now face? This may be important. The bill is hardly home-free given the huge differences betwen the two sausages that have come out of the two chambers of our sausage making apparatus. Here is a columnist in The New York Times on the intra-party split.

8. And here is ABC News.

9. Forty-five years ago, Kenneth Arrow wrote a "seminal paper" about the economics of health care. Krugman cites it as gospel, others aren't so worshipful.