October 29, 2007

Ladies and gentleman, we have a winner. Two of them actually. The Wall Street Journal has an entire editorial this morning devoted to my colleague Ben Zycher's study, Comparing Public and Private Health Insurance.

Enthusiasts for government-financed health care don't seem to mind playing Pangloss. All is for the best in the best of all possible systems, which would have the government as single payer, aka "Medicare for all." The frequent claim is that eliminating profits and private administrative expenses would more than pay for the cost of covering all the uninsured.

Well -- no, as demonstrated in a new study by Benjamin Zycher, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a former senior economist for the Reagan Council of Economic Advisers. He estimates that the real economic costs of moving to single payer would be at least twice those of today's semimarket patchwork.

And Investor's Business Daily has an adaptation of Peter Huber's City Journal article, Cherry Garcia and the End of Socialized Medicine:

Socialized medicine was a smart idea back when medicine was too stupid to halt infectious epidemics, discourage suicidal lifestyles or discern the perils in killer genes. ...

No two human stews are quite the same, however, and the problems they incubate are much less evenhanded than the ones spread by sewage and sneezing neighbors.

Taken together, Ben and Peter explain why there are powerful economic, scientific, and public policy rationales for more market incentives in health care.

Posted by Paul Howard at October 29, 2007 10:22 AM

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