Marc Andreessen's recent essay, called "It's time to build," is destined to ruffle feathers. In it, he not only sings the virtues of building in its broadest sense -- everything from healthcare and housing to education and manufacturing -- but he calls out the western world for smug complacency with the status quo. We are no longer choosing to build. And a good example of that is how we have been managing (and mismanaging) this current pandemic.

Here's an excerpt:

In fact, I think building is how we reboot the American dream. The things we build in huge quantities, like computers and TVs, drop rapidly in price. The things we don’t, like housing, schools, and hospitals, skyrocket in price. What’s the American dream? The opportunity to have a home of your own, and a family you can provide for. We need to break the rapidly escalating price curves for housing, education, and healthcare, to make sure that every American can realize the dream, and the only way to do that is to build.

Marc has also included a suggested reading list if you click through on the above tweet. By the time you do that, I am sure there will also be a lot of discussion around his essay.

I just came across this chart from Axios, which relies on data from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis and the Kaiser Family Foundation. It compares median household income against the average cost of employer health insurance (in the United States).

What it is saying is that, after adjusting for inflation, the median household income has only increased by 2% from 1999 to 2017, whereas employer health insurance costs have increased by some 121% over this same time period.

The takeaway: Rising healthcare costs are believed to be eating away at take-home pay in the US. As of 2017, health insurance costs were estimated to represent about 30% of the average household income. That feels like a big number to me.

Albert Wenger recently penned an interesting post about the “R” word.

It’s about health insurance and why redistribution is a toxic word in U.S. politics, but also why much of what we do as a society – from public roads to insurance – is actually about redistribution. What I like about the post is that he cuts through a lot of the noise and gets right at the crux of things.

Here’s part of his conclusion:

So what should you take away from this? There always is some element of redistribution to insurance – at a minimum ex post and generally also ex ante. The “why should I (usually some healthy person) pay for x (usually some payment for someone from a different demographic)” objection to health insurance is about redistribution. We should acknowledge this openly and not pretend that it is otherwise, because then we can move forward and say “you should, because that is your contribution to how our society works.”

The point of his post, which he reiterates in the comment section, is that “insurance is a commons more than it is a market.” Too much individual choice – for instance, rich people opting out because they don’t need it – actually weakens the system.

But you should really read his entire post. It’s good.

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash