5 Big Questions About Health Care

Health care, and who/how it is paid for, is a complicated issue -- there are multiple questions to answer, the complexities of human behavior, and multiple stakeholders? Let's not be left to the sound-bite solutions of the political left or right, because those solutions as described do not address all the questions, nor

I really appreciated the approach Arnold Kling used in this article. He lists these five questions for health care reformers:

1. What will we do about the large projected deficit in Medicare?
2. What can we do to reduce government subsidies for extravagant use of medical procedures with high costs and low benefits?
3. What should we do about the health care needs of the very poor?
4. What should we do about the health care needs of the very sick?
5. What should we do about a scenario in which both income inequality and the share of average income devoted to health care rise sharply?

And then he works through some political, economic, and behavioral dimensions. He outlines things systematically, using good questions to guide his thinking along the way. (You don't have to agree with his conclusions, by the way, to learn a lot about how to think through a complicated problem.)

Read the whole article here. Recommended.