Sure, it would take a few stolen bases to present the thought in the form of an argument, but watching the Tiverton School Committee stand firm against requests from parents for permission to move their children out-of-district to be better served (they believe) elsewhere, I couldn’t help but flash forward to some similar plea within the structure of public health insurance.
“Ma’am, we understand that you feel you’ve had horrible results with our local doctors and that you think your son would have a better chance of a healthy life if he had access to the children’s facility across the state, but if we make this exception for you, the precedent would bankrupt us. According to these statistics, the doctors participating in our program are just as competent under various criteria as the doctors in that facility, so we really can’t justify the cost.”
To be sure, there’s already too much of such decision-making in our system based on insurance companies typically contracted through the workplace, but that’s an argument for deregulation, not omniregulation.