HEALTH CARE SPENDING IS OUT OF CONTROL
HEALTH CARE IN America costs too much because we pay for it the wrong way. And it’s all but certain that we’re going to continue doing so for a very long time.
The crux of the problem is third-party payment, or, as most people think of it, insurance. Health insurance doesn’t just protect people from financial ruin. It insulates them from individual decisions about price and service quality. Those decisions become invisible, outsourced to a middleman—either a private insurer or a federal program—while the patient whose health is at stake is removed from the equation. The result is a system where prices are inscrutable, if they can even be called prices at all.
The dominance of third-party
