As always, Paul Krugman is addressing the issues that matter, and exactly how they matter. In today's column, he goes after the Bush administration for their lack of a policy for improving American health care.
It's true that the U.S. spends far more on health care than any other country, but this wouldn't be a bad thing if the spending got results. The real question is why, despite all that spending, many Americans aren't assured of the health care they need, and American life expectancy is near the bottom for advanced countries.
Where is the money going? A lot of it goes to overhead. A recent study found that private insurance companies spend 11.7 cents of every health care dollar on administrative costs, mainly advertising and underwriting, compared with 3.6 cents for Medicare and 1.3 cents for Canada's government-run system. Also, our system is very generous to drug companies and other medical suppliers, because — unlike other countries' systems — it doesn't bargain for lower prices.
The result is that American health care, which at its best is the best in the world, offers much of the population a worst-of-all-worlds combination of insecurity and high costs. And that combination is getting worse: insurance premiums are rising, and companies are becoming increasingly unwilling to offer insurance to their employees.
I have bolded one sentence above because it's a fact I wish I could share with every free market evangelist who preaches that putting every facet of civic life into the hands of capitalists will make them more efficient and less expensive. That's bullshit, especially when it comes to essential services such as health care. As the study noted proves, private insurance companies in the United States spend ten times as much on administrative overhead per dollar spent on health care as the Canadian government spends on its administrative costs.
That's right. The evil socialist apparatus of the Canadian government that ensures all Canadians have free health care spends one tenth what the lean, mean, privatized machine in the United States spends on administrative costs.
I'm not suggesting anyone get rid of the markets. But privatization of essential services during the reign of neoliberal economics for the past twenty to thirty years has only eroded the social infrastructure of developed countries such as the United States and left people everywhere wondering, where did all the money go? Believe it or not, America, sometimes the government is more efficient. Sometimes government should intervene in the marketplace. Sometimes liberal government is more valuable than the ethic of the marketplace.
If America had "let the markets decide" everything, slavery would still be legal. Don't let insurance and pharmaceutical companies enslave you.
4:34:08 PM 
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