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The Recent Health Care Bill - Freakonomics Blog - NYTimes.com

Wes sent me this link.

I agree completely with Levitt. The main problem is that people don’t care how much something costs, if they are not directly paying for it. That is why health care is so expensive.

And we are going to have to limit care at some point.

“That is more or less the situation we now have with health care.  It isn’t pretty to talk about, but if it costs $200,000 to keep an octogenarian alive for a month, someone has to pay for it.  If it were the children of that octogenarian who had to cover part of the bill, and paying for that last month of life was the difference between being able to pay for the octogenarian’s grandchildren to go to college or not, there would be some hard choices to make.  With health care expenditures approaching 20% of GDP, there are going to be tough choices.  Markets cannot function when the people who receive the benefits of a good or a service are not the ones who are paying for it.”