Disownership

Arnold Kling has an interesting behavioral hypothesis he uses to explain the relative lack of catastrophic (e.g. high deductible) health insurance coverage. As he puts it, "If the disownership hypothesis is correct, then the attempt to wean the public off of insulation and toward catastrophic coverage may be more challenging than I had realized." Kling's "disownership" hypothesis may be wrong, then I strongly suspect that there is some behavioral mechanism at work here that will be just as hard to surmount. While I'm feeling pessimistic, I might as well link to this article in which Bruce Bartlett surrenders to the trend of ever growing government, and supports a VAT.