Health Insurance Options

Options in the trading sense: the right to buy or sell something in the future. A cute idea in this article from Managed Care. The authors suggest creating an options market for individual services in health care. So, since I have kids and a trampoline, I should buy an option on pediatric orthopedics. But since there's no history of diabetes in my family, I might roll the dice and not buy an option on diabetic care.

I say this is a "cute" idea because it's clever, but totally ignores how people actually behave. Forget the complexity of options trading, how many of us are involved enough in managing our investments that we have even thought about buying/selling options? Remember, people have long thought that putting money into their 401k was important, but taking the time to figure out how to configure their investments proved prohibitive.

Who knows, maybe I'm ready for it. We're done having kids, who wants to buy our OB option?