Here's what John Kerry says he'll do to improve health care (from a speech in Iowa posted to his web site):

In my first 100 days as President, I'll offer America a real deal on health care that starts with cutting costs and stopping skyrocketing premiums...

The average health care cost per person in Iowa is about $4,000. Under my plan, you'll see real savings of up to $1,000 on that bill. That's $1,000 that can help buy groceries, pay the bills, and give your family a break.

Here's how we'll do it. Right now, only four out of every one thousand insurance claims deal with health care costs over $50,000. Insurance companies, however, end up spending a fifth of their expenses paying for these very few cases. If they're spending that much, you can bet everyone else's premiums are going to go up. Under my plan the government will pick up most of the tab for these expensive cases - and the premiums for middle-class families will go down.

So we're going to save money on healthcare by lowering insurance costs -- by having the government pay for any cases which cost an insurance company over $50,000. Passing the bill right back to ... us, the taxpayers and customers, again. Only with extra costs added by the government.

If every Iowan is paying $1,000 out of $4000 for each of these cases, it means they'll now have a $3000 insurance bill -- and probably be paying an extra $2000 in taxes! You can't get something for nothing.

Talk about favors for "special interests"! He'll be taking taxes of which amount to more than 25% of the total cost of health insurance and giving it to insurance companies, at taxpayer expense!

Alarmingly, it looks like this might create an incentive for insurance companies to move "marginal" cases into the more costly category. If it looks like a guy's bill might be $42,000, there is an incentive here to leave him in the hospital until the bill passes $50K, adding yet another $8,000 to what the taxpayer (who is probably also an insurance customer) has to pick up. If an insurance company can do this, it will drive it's average costs down, and make it appear to offer a lower-cost insurance product to customers than competitors who do not -- so the pressure will be for everyone in the industry to start doing this.

Undoubtedly, that'll give some future Democrat ammuntion for then complaining about the "corrupt" insurance industry, and his need to put it under more governmental control, or eliminate it altogether -- when perverse government incentives caused the problem in the first place!

Kerry says he'll fight medicare fraud. That's good, if true. (How much will that save us?) Yet Kerry also promises here that he'll give us much more benefits from "the government" (e.g. from us) and also slash bureaucracy. I guess he's counting on our desire to have it both ways. But sadly, there's no such thing as a free lunch.

You think healthcare is expensive now? Just wait until it's "free"!

Thanks to Steve Verdon for the heads-up.

UPDATE 10/31: It appears the goalposts have changed a little, but the fundamental problem remains. This is finally getting some dicussion.