Photo: Seattle Municipal ArchivesMany economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between “a complete waste of time” and “actually making the situation worse.”
Will the Conservative Party do better with health-care reform in the U.K.? Delia Lloyd is cautiously optimistic that the proposed baby steps towards more market-based health care will improve the British system.
Even if the British health care reform fails, there seems to be a lot to like in the policies that David Cameron is pursuing.
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I’m leaning towards “actually making the situation worse.”
“Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between ‘a complete waste of time’ and ‘actually making the situation worse.’”
So wait — is that hope, or change?
It would be helpful if you provided links to the “many economists” who believe that the health care bill is either of the things you suggest. Or to detail along which measures it falls short.
At a minimum, the law is projected to result in millions of Americans getting health insurance. More optimistically, there are components of the bill that may result in meaningful Medicare reform, and somewhat decreased tax-based distortion of health benefits.
There’s also the possibility that the individual mandate and the exchanges will make the health insurance market work substantially better than it currently does, at least for individuals and small businesses. Like all insurance markets, health insurance is subject to adverse selection. The individual mandate is a huge step to address this problem.
Please link back to any prior posts you have with this kind of discussion that I may have missed.
Thanks,
Aron
i agree with Aron Boros- the opening paragraph of this post sounds like an 8 year old essay on the topic- anyway, the UK doesn’t have to do “better” than us, cuz were already behind them, in terms of cost containment
I like Levitt’s writings and way of thinking about the world, but the first sentence of this post was both lazy and misleading. First, as another commenter already noted, Levitt should have included some cites (links) with the sentence. Second, “many” is not “most” – I could also accurately write the following sentence: “Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between ‘a signficant advancement’ and ‘a small push forward.’”
Indeed, the Obama health care proposal was originally developed by an economist (somebody Prof Levitt likely took a class from in graduate school!).
It would be helpful if you provided links to the “many economists” who believe that the health care bill is either of the things you suggest. Or to detail along which measures it falls short.
Seriously. “Many economists” wouldn’t even cut it on Wikipedia.
“Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between ‘a complete waste of time’ and ‘actually making the situation worse.’”
Assuming “many” refers to a fixed number, it seems plausible that someone could also write “Many economists view the health-care bill passed in the U.S. earlier this year as falling somewhere between ‘totally awesome’ and ‘mildly helpful.’” Both of these statements are meaningless in practice except to identify the political leanings of the author.
The biases of the main authors of this site were always on the periphery, but recently they’ve begun to come to the forefront. Between the global warming “solutions” ridiculousness, hosting Rajan’s public fight with Krugman, and now the quote above, it seems clear to me that this blog is no longer worth reading due to the obvious partiality exhibited by these authors.
Um, many economists also supported health care reform.