Health care. While the quality and the technology of the health care business in the U.S. is outstanding the way we get it and how we pay for it are not so hot.
In 2001 (2009 — 2001 = 8 years ago) Milton Friedman addressed the issue, isolated the reasons for the problems we have with it, and suggested ways to fix them. His solutions are savagely resisted by several very powerful interests. So they haven’t been tried, or even discussed very much. Friedman said,
to document the two (related?) respects in which the United States is exceptional: we spend a higher percentage of national income on medical care (and more per capita) than any other OECD country, and our government finances a smaller fraction of that spending than all countries except Korea.
Friedman’s suggestions would very likely fix the major problems with our health care system. But they wouldn’t provide a windfall of money for anybody, which is probably why they aren’t among the remedies in the two pieces of legislation which came out of the House of Representatives and the Senate. Unions, trial lawyers, and other interested parties didn’t spend hundreds of millions of dollars electing Democrats just so the country could have a good health care system. They don’t care how it comes out so long as they get theirs.
Friedman’s diagnosis is not long and its simplicity, given the length of the two health care bills, will astound. Give it a look. HERE.
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