Arnold Kling on a health care debate that should be happening. It's between himself and Daniel Callahan, who is very anti-market with regards to health care delivery. They agree on much:
"What he calls technology is what in Crisis of Abundance I called "premium medicine," because I want to include the increased use of specialists as well as physical capital. Callahan would agree."
"He agrees that Medicare is unsustainable in its current form. He agrees that minor changes to our current health care system, such as those being debated this year, are not going to do the trick."
"He agrees with me that other developed countries, including those in Europe, control health care costs by restricting supply."
However: "The important point to note is that there is no magical efficiency that comes from eliminating private health insurance (in fact, many European countries use private health insurance). Other countries hold down health care spending by restricting supply, particularly of expensive medical services."
There is also much on which they disagree. The most notable is this, from Callahan:
In the end, government must answer to the public, forcing an accountability that is absent in private sector medicine.
Of course, I [Kling] think this sentence is 180 degrees wrong. If you could summarize the difference between a pro-market and an anti-market person in one sentence, it would be that pro-market people believe that the market as an institution provides greater accountability than does government, and anti-market people believe the reverse.
I think the sentence in bold explains much.
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