WANTING TOO MUCH
Cannon calls it "Klings Iron Trilemma" on healthcare:
Can it be solved?
As an optimization problem, it strikes me as one of the variety that doesn't have a "perfect" solution, but one that has a near-perfect solution / optimization, if you just relax the constraints even just a little bit.
More later, perhaps. One topic suggests itself, off the bat:
On his blog, Kling (or one of his readers) notes that, if you ask an economist what kind of insurance they would like, they will reply, hands-down, "catastrophic insurance". So, a question then becomes, why isn't public policy being used to push insurance companies to develop a deep and useful market for that, rather than "pushing" them in other directions?
PRESCRIPTION WITHOUT ADEQUATE DESCRIPTION
I continue on my one man, limited quest to find an economist who has done a comprehensive, scientific study of the cost drivers in the health care system overall. (I don't doubt it may have been attempted, but I just haven't seen it yet).
Instead, so far, I've found people who (a) are looking where the light is turned on - namely using the statistics on hand, without demanding measurement sufficient to judge key aspects of the problem or (b) emphasizing a portion of the description (I'll be looking to see if Kling makes a truly numbers-based case for his emphasis on 'economically excess treatment', if that's a fair way to phrase it).
If true, this is how economists potentially get a bad name as scientists, apart from flip snipes about one-handedness. Somehow, in the rush to prescription, they disrespect their readers and, somehow, the 'nature of the beast' is such that it's not immediately identifiable as óutre. Perhaps, historically, there have been reasons for that, but it's time to relax, to some extent. There is little chance that there is a generation of young communists or socialists coming in America, right?
Friday, August 10, 2007
Kling's Iron Trilemma or CATO's Conundrum
