Where Are Entrepreneurs on Health Care?

European Straits #23

Dear all,

In September of last year, I published an issue of The Family Papers dedicated to universal basic income (UBI): Enough With This Basic Income Bullshit. Thanks to this paper being touted by Tim O’Reilly and discussed on Hacker News, I was dragged into heated arguments around the future of social policy. And while the paper itself was initially written rather hastily in reaction to something I had read, the subsequent discussions helped me clarify why exactly I doubt UBI so much.

One of my criticisms concerns the idea that UBI would be simpler. While simplicity exerts a welcome fascination on tech entrepreneurs (after all, entrepreneurship is the art of making things simple), we shouldn’t forget that social policy is complex for a reason: it’s about providing coverage against many risks at the scale of an entire nation. And I still don’t get how distributing a fixed amount of money to everyone can cover people against complex and critical risks such as illness or unaffordable ho…