Arnold Kling of EconLog proposes one possible solution to rising healthcare costs:
If you're serious about cutting costs in government-funded health care programs, then you're serious about having government say "no" to a lot of procedures where now it says "yes." What that means is that "Medicare for all" does not mean Medicare-as-we-know-it for all. It means something else. Call it Medicare-Minus for all.... So I actually propose a Medical Guidelines Commission to obtain and analyze statistics on the impact of medical procedures and then present the results in terms that doctors and patients can understand. I think that in order to cut back on the use of procedures with high costs and low benefits, we need to give consumers the means, the motive, and the opportunity to make different decisions.
Reader Comments