Kevin “CalPundit” Drum, at his spiffy new Movable Type digs (this ought to be a new trademark, a correlate to “Blogger Permalinks Aren’t Working” and “Read the Whole Thing”), favorably discusses Dick Gephardt’s almost-but-not-quite-Hillarycare plan. The nicest thing I’ll say about it is that at least it isn’t single-payer.

Universal healthcare is the lefty nirvana that won’t die, for some odd reason, even though it has no natural constituency. The dirty little secret in the health insurance debate is that most people who don’t have it are young, not poor, and healthy, and hence don’t need it. What universal healthcare is fundamentally about is dragging these people into the risk pool to further subsidize the healthcare of the old and chronically ill. Everyone gets to sleep better at night knowing we’ve cut per capita expenses on healthcare while ignoring the fact that we’ve added 30 million new payees who didn’t need to be in the system in the first place. (The more I write about it, the more I realize that this is lefty nirvana: find people to subsidize something you want, and pretend they’re getting something out of it too.)

What would I do instead? Give people access to low-cost catastrophic insurance coverage (with a high deductable) and a dollar-for-dollar AGI deduction for routine medical care and out-of-pocket expenses. Not quite as sexy, but it has the advantages of not creating perverse incentives to get higher tax credits (“we’ll just reincorporate in Delaware to get the full 100% credit”) and placing more pricing pressure in the hands of health care consumers, rather than oligopolistic HMOs and insurance companies.