Here’s a scenario for you: Imagine that tomorrow, the federal government started regulating the car insurance industry so that instead of purchasing your own gas, your insurance agency would be required to shell out money — with the exception of a small deductible — every time you filled up. Sounds great, right? Big brother to the rescue! But let’s look at the possible effects of this.

Would you start using more gas? It’s likely you would, simply because it would cost very little. All you would pay is your deductible and after that all your gas would be free. That would mean the insurance companies would have to raise their prices to compensate for the additional consumption.

It would also decrease the incentive for gas companies to keep prices low. Since a third party is paying, higher prices wouldn’t directly cost you a dime, which means that gas companies would no longer have to worry about high gas prices driving away consumers. Of course, indirectly, it would cost plenty because insurance companies would have to make up for the increased price of gas by raising their prices as well.

These escalated insurance prices would lead you to consider dropping your coverage. Unfortunately, you wouldn’t be able to drop only the overpriced gas insurance. Thanks to federal regulations, you would have to drop your collision coverage as well. (For the sake of this metaphor, please disregard the fact that you are legally required to purchase liability insurance.)

Sound like a good idea? Because it’s very similar to what’s happening right now with health care.

Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman said, “Before World War II, medical care was dispensed through a relatively free market. No third party was involved in the strictly voluntary transaction between them. Medical insurance covered catastrophic events, not everyday care.”

The point of insurance is that it is supposed to insure you against large, expensive surprises, not predictable, everyday occurrences like filling up with gas or a visit to the doctor’s office, which could be paid for out-of-pocket. That’s why it’s called insurance — it insures against risks. There’s no need to insure against inevitabilities because, well, they’re inevitable.

One of the easiest ways to decrease the cost of health insurance would be to stop requiring insurance companies to cover minor, every-day occurrences.

But politicians, seeking re-election, find it easy to stand up for the little guy by making big, greedy insurance companies pay for more and more stuff while ignoring even the most obvious consequences.

Just like in the example above about how people will use more gas when someone else is paying for it, so too will people consume more health care when someone else is paying for it.

As Hoover Institution Fellow John Cogan says, “Consumers have little incentive to limit their use of unnecessary medical care …” The end result is a higher cost of insurance.

Auto insurance, life insurance and homeowner’s insurance attract little, if any, national attention due to excessive cost. It’s only the overregulated health insurance industry that is so costly.

Although excessive regulation in the form of requirements on what must be insured is a major cause of the higher health care prices, Democrats want us to believe the solution to this problem is even more regulation in the health care industry. It’s as if they believe — or at least want you to believe — that more of a bad thing makes a good thing.

There’s a Larry the Cable Guy joke that goes something like, “Her horse got a broken leg and I had to shoot it. So now it’s got a broken leg and a gunshot wound. I don’t know what you shoot it for. I guess it helps the healing process. If it ain’t better tomorrow, I’m gonna shoot it again.”

– Blake Hasenmiller is a senior in industrial engineering and ecomonics from DeWitt, Iowa.