Canadian-born libertarian economist David Henderson explains the essential problem with the Obama administration’s position on mandating contraception insurance coverage:
Insurance is for consumption smoothing: that is, we buy it for high-cost, low-probability events so that a low-probability hit one year will not drastically cut our real consumption that year. The outlay for contraceptives is relatively small and relatively high-probabiity for their users. So on neither of the two dimensions is the purchase of contraceptives what economists call an “insurable event.”
The analysis holds both for Obama’s original plan and the so-called compromise.
