Recommended Reading on Health Care

This article made me think of one of the big questions I have about the health care system.

You believe that the problem is government. I can not prove you wrong, but I suspect there are other problems as well.

Most products we buy are provided by large scale corporations that create large economies of scale and much lower costs. Pure Adam Smith's pin factory thinking.

But the overwhelming bulk of health care is provided by small partnerships and other small firms like hospitals. So outside of the production of drugs the system get few benefits of scale and specialization of labor. Rather we have thousands of very small individual partnerships of doctors where each faces the same inefficiencies and none have sufficient scale to really address them. Most hospitals, especially the non-profits essentially have the same problem.

This all implies that one of the major reasons that health care is so inefficient and so expensive is that the providers all approximate the economists perfectly competitive model of the firms where no one firm has the power to influence the market and consequently no one firm has the power to experiment and work at a scale sufficient to improve productivity and reduce costs in the way large corporations do in almost every other economic sector.

I know this model is completely contrary to your biases and way of looking at the world, but I suspect it is just as relevant as your tendency to always find some way to blame government.