Health Care Commentary

The health care issue has always been something that has puzzled me, as I've never seemed to really feel as if the issues have been properly highlighted nor solutions put forward. Whenever I do read about, the issue is always so highly politicized and partisan. This is an interesting commentary by Richard Posner on his blog, www.becker-posner-blog.com. I don't think it quite gets at the issue, but he raises an interesting point that some of the issues could be cultural and that maybe the extra costs represent more of an American preference to a type of health care and life style that costs more.

This is the conclusion to the post, which can be found in its entirety here:
http://www.becker-posner-blog.com/archives/2009/06/the_administrat.html

"To return to the initial puzzle of why our peer nations are able to provide what seems, judging by outcomes, a level of health equal or superior to that of Americans at far lower cost, the only convincing answer is that the health-care providers in those nations limit treatment. I am not sure of the explanation, but the possibilities include: the professional model is more tenacious in societies less committed to free markets and a commercial culture than the United States; more of their hospitals are public and more of their doctors are public employees, who are therefore salaried rather than entrepreneurial; and Americans, being less fatalistic than most other peoples, have a more intense demand for life-extending procedures. These are reasons why a national health plan modeled, as the Administration's appears to be, on the health plans of peer nations with much lower aggregate health costs is unlikely to work well, or at least to generate net cost savings.

Of course if people value extension of life very highly--and there is evidence that, in the United States at least, most people do--a very costly health care system may be cost-justified, in the sense that the benefits exceed the costs. Yet the benefits seem rather illusory, since the extra money we spend on health care does not seem to produce better outcomes. But international comparisons of health that are limited as they largely are to differences in longevity are crude. They ignore health benefits unrelated to longevity, such as the benefits conferred by cosmetic surgery and the possibility that the additional costs of health care in the United States enable people to live more dangerous, strenuous, or self-indulgent lives and by doing so confer utility."