Humanity

"The details of last week's fiasco about American health care are for my colleagues over on that desk to deal with. My purpose here is just to point out that the economic structure of health care in other places just isn't what all too many people think it is. There's a large part of the American political class insisting that this is just obvious. We should have a national, single payer, health care financing system. And the amazing thing about this is that so few countries actually do that. And most of those countries who are thought to have better health care systems than the US don't do that either.

There are indeed national health care systems out there--but they tend not to be single payer. And there are single payer systems out there, or close enough at least--but they tend not to be national. Which is something that we really ought to be thinking about, no?

Take it as read that the US system isn't as good as it could be. And also that we might want to propose something to make it better. So, we're agreeing that something must be done. My point here is just that the economics of what we should do might well not be the same as the economics of that national single payer system we're urged to implement."