James Schneider  Don't Nudge Me, Man! - Health Insurance Edition
Open Letter to President Wilde... Never reason from a price
chan...  Nudge's chapter on Medicare Part D discussed the
difficulties people had making optimal plan choices. The elderly
often faced such a bewildering array of plans that it would have
been almost impossible to minimize out-of-pocket expenses based
on the specific medications that a person needed. On top of
this, millions of poor people were automatically enrolled into
the program without making any plan choice at all. Instead of
the government choosing the best plan based on a person's drug
history, most of these people were randomly assigned a plan.
Thaler and Sunstein strongly disapproved of random assignment:
"It seems somewhere between callous and irresponsible to assign
plans without even looking at people's specific needs."
Although the discussion in Nudge was specifically about Medicare
Part D, it probably reinforced the general idea that minimizing
out-of-pocket medical ex