POLICY: Innovation in French health care, yes really…

Nov 13, 2007• 1

John Cohn’s most excellent article about why Michael Kinsley would still receive the treatments that allow him to continue to add not always intelligent contributiions to the health care debate is up at TNR.

Go read—Creative Destruction.

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Tagged as: Policy, Uncategorized

Matthew, perhaps you’re spending too much time congratulating yourself on all the fetes & soirees you’re being invited to lately to actually pay attention to intelligent writing about healthcare – y’know, like you used to do before you became a darling of the conference sponsorship circuit?
Kinsley’s piece contains more than a little intelligence about healthcare – considerably more than in the average Krugman piece on the subject.
My favorite example is this observation:

“What’s different about health insurance is the opposite: Much of it isn’t insurance at all but a subsidy. The value of the subsidy is the difference between what the individual pays and what the insurance would cost in the free market. If people were buying health care or insurance with their own money, they might or might not spend too much — whatever “too much” is — but no one else would need to care if they did.”

A crippling defect of most of Krugman’s healthcare rants (one of several, which makes him practically harmful to read on the topic) is that he essentially takes healthcare ‘product’ as given. That is, his chief problem with health care seems to be that not enough people have enough of it paid for without having to think about it – not that maybe a lot of what’s paid for isn’t worth paying for, for anyone, in the first place.
Cohn’s observations on where innovation comes from? Eh – it’s ok, but nothing special. Innovation comes from individuals discovering ways to harvest surplus from institutions (whether governmental or not) and their predictable defense of current ‘conventional’ methods – nothing new to see there….

1 reply »

gjudd says:

Nov 13, 2007 at 6:28 am

Matthew, perhaps you’re spending too much time congratulating yourself on all the fetes & soirees you’re being invited to lately to actually pay attention to intelligent writing about healthcare – y’know, like you used to do before you became a darling of the conference sponsorship circuit?
Kinsley’s piece contains more than a little intelligence about healthcare – considerably more than in the average Krugman piece on the subject.
My favorite example is this observation:

“What’s different about health insurance is the opposite: Much of it isn’t insurance at all but a subsidy. The value of the subsidy is the difference between what the individual pays and what the insurance would cost in the free market. If people were buying health care or insurance with their own money, they might or might not spend too much — whatever “too much” is — but no one else would need to care if they did.”

A crippling defect of most of Krugman’s healthcare rants (one of several, which makes him practically harmful to read on the topic) is that he essentially takes healthcare ‘product’ as given. That is, his chief problem with health care seems to be that not enough people have enough of it paid for without having to think about it – not that maybe a lot of what’s paid for isn’t worth paying for, for anyone, in the first place.
Cohn’s observations on where innovation comes from? Eh – it’s ok, but nothing special. Innovation comes from individuals discovering ways to harvest surplus from institutions (whether governmental or not) and their predictable defense of current ‘conventional’ methods – nothing new to see there….