Chasing the Rabbit: Official Blog by Author Steven Spear

David Brooks is right (”The Hardest Call,” Dec. 17, NYTimes) and Paul Krugman is wrong (”Pass the Bill,” Dec. 17, NYTimes).

Health care reform is ostensibly aimed at improving quality, affordability, and access.  But why is healthcare such an outlier, when most other products and services are characterized by high and ever improving quality, low and ever decreasing per unit cost, and ever expanding volume—the stark opposite of the healthcare experience?

The problem is that the delivery of care is typically managed in fashions inadequate for achieving excellence, and markets for health care services are too primitive to encourage and reward the improvement and innovation necessary to achieve excellence.  This penalizes the providers most innovative in achieving excellence and rewards the laggards who don’t.

If Washington really wants to help, it should stop creating Rube Goldberg schemes that largely are about wealth redistribution.  Instead, it should focus on repairing health care markets to allow informed choice by patients and reward innovation in delivery by providers, so health care markets can repair the delivery of care.

Related posts:

1. Repair Healthcare Markets So Markets Can Repair Healthcare
2. Healthcare Regulation: To Foster or Replace Markets and Competition?
3. Bob Herbert: A Less Than Honest Policy–Sen. Healthcare ‘Reform’
4. Outcomes Measurement: The Linchpin of Healthcare Reform
5. Theory and Evidence for Repairing Health Care Markets So Markets Can Repair Health Care Delivery…