Look, there is a big and getting bigger problem with health care costs.
Not really. The focus on costs is wrong-headed.
http://american.com/archive/2009/september/forecasting-the-cost-of-u-s-healthcare
We could spend 50% more as a percentage of GDP and still get good value (at least on the surface. A deeper dive into actual value versus just dollars spent would need to be done).
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204409904574350810610869756.html
“Mr. Obama has said that “the cost of health care has weighed down our economy.” No one thinks the 20% of our GDP that’s attributable to manufacturing is weighing down the economy, because it’s intuitively clear that one person’s expenditure on widgets is another person’s income. But the same is true of the health-care industry. The $2.4 trillion Americans spend each year for health care doesn’t go up in smoke. It’s paid to other Americans.”…
“In a 2007 study, Stanford University economists Robert E. Hall (who will take office next year as president of the American Economic Association) and Charles I. Jones reported that modeling they’ve conducted has found that mid-21st century U.S. health-care expenditures would optimally amount to 30% of GDP or more. They wrote:
“We examine the allocation of resources that maximizes social welfare in our model. We abstract from the complicated institutions that shape spending in the United States and ask a more basic question: from a social welfare standpoint, how much should the nation spend on health care, and what is the time path of optimal health spending? . . .
“Viewed from every angle, our results support the proposition that both historical and future increases in the health spending share are desirable. . . . [W]e believe it likely that maximizing social welfare in the United States will require the development of institutions that are consistent with spending 30 percent or more of GDP on health by the middle of the century.”
The GOP’s “plan” should be to let this happen, as it would naturally and for the Dems to get out of the f*cking way of me spending my money on my health if I damn well f*cking want to. It can’t get much simpler than that.
