October 12, 2007

Arnold Kling has got a very interesting book review up on TCS Daily on Sharon Brownlee's book "Overtreated", where he says that the solution to poor standards in health care is not more regulation, but less:

Our system for licensing doctors, nurses, physical therapists, and so forth, makes it very hard to rationalize and improve our health care delivery system. If you wanted to make McMedicine really work at delivering quality care at low cost, you would economize on the use of highly-educated professionals. Instead, you would use technicians and trained apprentices. You would attain the trust of consumers by earning an overall corporate reputation for reliable service, not by having each employee display a sheepskin on the wall.

The point is that getting the advantages of McMedicine may not be a matter of sheer collective will, as Brownlee would have it. Instead, it might require radical deregulation of medical licensure and practice regulations.

Read the whole thing. Hat tip: Instapundit.

Posted by Paul Howard at October 12, 2007 02:47 PM