The modern era has inherited two models of health insurance: the fee-for-service model and the HMO model. Neither is appropriate to the Information Age. Both models assume that (1) the amount of sickness is limited and largely outside the control of the insureds, (2) methods of treating illness are limited and well defined, and (3) because of patient ignorance and asymmetry of information, treatment decisions will always be filtered by physicians, based on their own knowledge and experience or clinical practice guidelines.
However, an explosion of technological innovation and the rapid diffusion of knowledge about the potential of medical science to diagnose and treat disease have rendered these assumptions obsolete. In this chapter, we briefly outline the type of insurance we believe would emerge if we rely on markets, rather than regulators, to solve our problems.
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