During an interview with former Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius that took place on Friday’s edition of NBC’s “Meet the Press Now,” host Garrett Haake said that the need to subsidize health insurance is an indicator that the system is “a broken market, that is a system that is not working.”
After Sebelius argued that every health plan in the country receives some degree of a subsidy from the federal government, Haake said, “Madam Secretary, I feel like if we were talking about any other industry in the country and you said, basically, every player in the marketplace, every competitor, if you will, had some kind of government subsidy, you would say that is a broken market, that is a system that is not working. Why is this system and the challenges here so hard to fix? Why is that the best way to deliver health care to people?”
Sebelius answered that health care “is expensive and it’s getting more expensive” due to drug breakthroughs and an aging population. “But the fact that this is a sort of shared partnership, with employers and individuals and the government playing a role, again, is not unusual. … I would not indicate that it’s a broken system. It is a system that has a public-private partnership.”
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