Kling and Mankiw on Health Care

November 5, 2007

Kling and Mankiw on Health Care

I talk for an hour with Russ Roberts, here. I'd love to hear your comments. Don't forget to vote for econtalk in the podcast awards.

Finally, Greg Mankiw raises some issues with health care statistics.

1. International comparisons of longevity are distorted by things like homicide rates and low-birth-weight infants.

2. The number of uninsured is boosted by: illegal immigrants; people eligible for Medicaid who have not signed up; and people earning over $50 K per year

3. Increasing expenditures on health care is not necessarily a bad thing.

Before I started delving into health care economics, I was thinking along similar lines, all of which tend to defend America's health care system. But I wound up in a different place, because of two facts. The first fact is that most of the "surge" in health care spending in the past 30 years has been in procedures involving specialists and high-tech medical equipment. The second fact is that comparisons of groups of people receiving different levels of these types of services almost always show no difference in outcomes. This leads me to believe that we make extravagant use of medical procedures with high costs and low benefits. We are, in Shannon Brownlee's term, overtreated.

We might be healthier if we spent less money on health care.