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October 17, 2007Marginal Revolution Takes on Health CareGeorge Mason economist Tyler Cowen has a bullet point list of how to debate health care. Everyone should take notes: 1. American health care outcomes look much better once we adjust for race and other demographic factors, including violence and car crashes. Some groups -- such as Asian-American women -- have remarkably good health care outcomes. 2. Some of the health care savings of other systems occur through price effects (e.g., doctors are paid an average of $60,000 in France) and do not involve real resource savings. 3. American's high expenditures, however wasteful they may be, nonetheless drive much of the world's medical innovation. Medical innovation is also a public good to some extent and no the pharmaceutical companies are not simply parasites on the NIH and universities. 4. America has a different structure of interest groups. and therefore a single payer system in the United States would not operate as does a single payer system in other countries. It would more likely favor the interests of doctors and insurance companies, for a start. Tyler makes a bunch more points, and they're all worth reading. A big hat tip to Instapundit, which, as usual, gets to these things first.
Posted by Paul Howard at October 17, 2007 04:23 PM CommentsPost a comment |
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