Randy Fine’s consumer choice: Let us pay for his doctors

Anyone who has ever dressed a toddler knows that “consumer choice” has its limits. “Empowering” the little ones to “shop the marketplace” of their own closet predictably ends up in tantrums, tears, cranky goodbyes at daycare and late arrivals at work.

Florida’s “repeal and replace” crowd spends little time dressing toddlers, and no time plowing through the pounds of fine print, disclaimers and traps for the unwary faced by consumers exercising their choice in the Insurance Marketplace that was born before Obama, let alone Obamacare.

The Insurance Industrial Complex will carry on for the foreseeable future, inflicting surprise billings, followed by medical bankruptcy, upon overwhelmed “consumers” who can barely lift the contracts they’ve been asked to “compare,” and cannot possibly be expected to comprehend what’s in them.

This is not a problem for Gov. Rick Scott and his zombie army of millionaire allies in the legislature. Their employment entitlements include eligibility to purchase a state health plan that covers almost everything and costs next to nothing.

Reporting last week from the Associated Industries of Florida conference, POLITICO’s Christine Sexton described how easy it is for lawmakers like newly-elected Rep. Randy Fine to be an empowered health care consumer.

As a candidate, the Harvard-educated “millionaire who founded a casino management company” railed against the health care market, damning it as a “disaster.”

Once elected, he signed his family up faster than you can buy a bottle of aspirin, and for almost as little money.

Who in their right mind wouldn’t?

Sexton needed no help from Harvard to crunch the numbers: Fine’s monthly premium is $180 for himself, his wife and two children. That’s $2,160 per year for him, a fraction of the real annual tab, which exceeds $15,000 and is picked up by the rest of us.

Fine told Sexton that he signed up with the state to “broaden his perspective on things … I wanted to understand what government health insurance is like.”

Here’s a prediction: He’s gonna like it just Fine.