Health care: where profits warp incentives

Echoing our recent Econ4 statement, Eduardo Porter explains in the New York Times why our healthcare-for-profit system means that Americans pay too much and get too little:

From the high administrative costs incurred by health insurers to screen out sick patients to the array of expensive treatments prescribed by doctors who earn more money for every treatment they provide, our private health care industry provides perhaps the clearest illustration of how the profit motive can send incentives astray.

By many objective measures, the mostly private American system delivers worse value for money than every other in the developed world. We spend nearly 18 percent of the nation’s economic output on health care and still manage to leave tens of millions of Americans without adequate access to care.

Read his piece here.