Here’s Maggie’s takedown of Herzlinger’s WSJ column, with a heavy dose of Uwe included. And as far as I can see the most important thing about any regulated individual insurance system is consistency of benefits across plans—which means the plans then have to concentrate on improving care rather  than gaming risk selection. And then there’s risk adjustment between them. (At least that’s the original Enthoven model).

I haven’t felt the need to torture myself enough to read the latest Herzlinger book—given that I suffered through the previous two, I awarded myself time off for good behavior. However, she appears to want to allow plans to offer personalized benefits “for consumer choice” and then somehow do back end-risk adjustment between them later. Funnily enough that’s roughly what Wellpoint’s California lobbyist said when I asked how they justified selling Tonik et al. At the least it sounds very complex (after all, risk-adjustment between plans with identical benefits is hard enough), and in reality it’s probably just more destruction of the risk pool.

So in other words the part of Switzerland that does work (the uniform benefits) is the part that Reggie wants to destroy. No doubt Maggie will be looking forward to lots of incoherent comments and accusations of plagiarism and poor research skills on her blog.