The Real Cost of Health Care
Hmm! I don’t really know what that is! But Robert J. Samuelson has an excellent column on Newsweek (via MSNBC) that discusses the issue. He makes a number of excellent points, including pointing out that we’ve hidden the actual cost of health care, though I suspect not nearly so successfully in this country as in some others.
One thing he points out is this:
Our health-care system will inevitably combine government regulation and private enterprise. But what should the mix be? Which patients, providers and technologies should be subsidized and why? How important is health care compared with other public and private goals? Will an expanding health-care sector spur the economy
The crux of the healthcare problem is that it needs to be rationed out in some fashion. Honest politicians dance around the issue, dishonest ones lie about it, disingenuous don’t realize it’s a problem.
The elephant in the room then is that different people have different notions of fair rationing and how to arrive at “fair”.
True, but any system that doesn’t take into account how the goods in question–health care in all its aspects–are produced, will tend to fail. Many government programs of distribution have failed because they assumed a commodity “existed” when in fact it needed to be produced.