Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise, 2nd Edition: Five Steps to a Better Health Care System

by John F. Cogan, R. Glenn Hubbard, Daniel P. Kessler

Book Overview

Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past forty years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency--and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. This second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise details a better approach, offering fundamental reform...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0817910646
• ISBN13: 9780817910648
• Release Date: March 2011
• Publisher: Hoover Institution Press
• Length: 176 Pages
• Weight: 2.95 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

A great set of proposals for discussing the critical reforms needed in our healthcare system

This short and focused book offers five suggestions to help lower our society's overall healthcare expenses, improve availability, while putting it on a more sound footing for controlling future cost growth. Discussing healthcare is a complicated issue and much of the public discussion is distorted by various kinds of self-interest, lack of knowledge about the technical aspects of the problem (both medical and economic), and different views of what the desirable outcomes would be. This one hundred-page book is a wonderful basic foundation so we can discuss the health care issues from a common ground. Our present private health care system suffers from several market distortions that prevent efficiencies. First, it arose from a wartime wage & price controlled economy in 1942 when companies began offering "fringe benefits" since they couldn't raise wages. The next biggest problem is that what we really have is pre-paid healthcare rather than true insurance. Insurance is based on the notion of sharing risk not the notion of no-risk no cost. Imagine if we have pre-paid lunches. Wouldn't the natural inclination be to consume bigger lunches than you normally would? Maybe even combine two meals of the day? You would not want to be paying for something you weren't getting the full benefit from, so you would over consume and costs would rise. That would spur the desire for more consumption and a vicious cycle gets worse. The notion that healthcare should be provided at no cost is pernicious. The government has no money of its own so we have to pay for our healthcare even if the government "provides" it. But worse than the payment problems this causes is the notion that we should be free to use our income on everything else but healthcare and that somehow when we use our own income for healthcare we view it as a kind of oppression. However, we use our income for many less necessary and some very foolish things. The amount of money we waste on foolish things like diet fads, pills, patent medicines, magnets & bracelets that do nothing, and various quack treatments has got to be a large fraction of our actual health care expenditure. We need to spend our money on health with greater awareness and understanding. So, what are the five recommendations the authors make in this book? 1) Change the tax law to reduce the preference for medical-care purchases through employer-based insurance. This is an important change because it will allow for people to make health care purchases with their own income and buy their own insurance with PRE-TAX dollars. As it is now, everything is biased towards shifting it to the employer program because anything we pay for is AFTER-TAX and therefore much more costly. Since everything is pushed to the employer pre-paid healthcare it exacerbates the over consumption problem. 2) Reform regulation markets for health insurance. This is about lowering costs by making national insurance pools and reforming sta