Heh…

Via Tyler Cowen, a business for taking care of your health care paperwork.

I have to admit, I never thought of this but I like the idea. And I’m jealous that I didn’t think of it. Dealing with paperwork, particularly specialized paperwork like healthcare stuff, is an acquired skill. One that can be honed by experience and that some people are better at than others. And, and this is important, something that it’s unsure how much time it will take ahead of time. (i.e. you can’t call insurance companies or hospitals unless you have 20-60 minutes free because you never know how long it will take.)

So it seems like a prime area to contract out that stuff to someone who’s better at it than yourself.

Of course, on the flip side it means making a lot of sensitive information available to the company. And it encourages a system where people pay insurance companies to generate huge amounts of paperwork and then people pay other people to deal with the huge amounts of paperwork. But the insurance companies were partially generating the huge amount of paperwork to disincentivize people to get their coverage. So it seems like it could lead to an escalating arms race of generating and dealing with paperwork. In other words, a lot of money and energy going towards useless crap.

So let’s just say I have mixed feelings. It’s brilliant, but we’d be better off passing a law mandating that we become The United States of New Swedish Canada, or some similar mix of practicality and free-market socialism.