David Leonhardt Gets It Wrong
I don’t think I have ever seen so many writers (especially at The New York Times) make so many mistakes about what a bill before Congress is going to do. Here is David’s latest:
At the heart of the health care debate is the question of whether it’s possible to cut medical costs without harming patients.
He goes on to give this example:
Since 1996, the Richmond area has lost more than 600 of its hospital beds, mostly because of state regulations on capacity… [Yet] the quality of care in Richmond is better than in most American metropolitan areas, according to various measures, and it continues to improve.
But that is not what the debate is about. Everyone can point to hundreds of examples of lower-cost, higher-quality care. Just as in education, we can point to hundreds of low-cost, high-quality schools.
The Question Is: Either in health care or in education can the federal government, using the tools of command-and-control, lower costs without reducing quality? The answer would seem to be: “No.”
Mr. Leonhardt asserts that Americans believe that “more is better” in health care, but tempers his (widely accepted) remark by pointing out that patients pay very little marginal cost of the next unit of treatment directly. He kind of throws that in as a minor factor, but it is the number-one factor.
There’s no area of life where people naturally believe that “more is better”. Is a 400 page book better than a 300 page book? Is a high-calorie meal better than a low-calorie meal? Is a Boeing Dreamliner better than a Cessna?
Nobody would asserts the superiority of “more” on its own.
In this article, Mr. Leonhardt is describing Certificate of Need (CON)regulations, whereby the government decides if a new health facility can open. He praises CON for reducing the supply of health services in Virginia. However, he also praises the Cleveland Clinic, which is in Ohio where the burden of CON is trivial; and it’s non-existent in Minnesota, home of the Mayo Clinic (http://tinyurl.com/nnssmt).
We are suffering a housing crisis, whereby too many people demanded “more” housing that they could not afford. Would Mr. Leonhardt assert that this crisis could be averted by the government deciding whether or not new houses could be built?
Like so many people who seem to know something about economics in general, Leonhardt knows nothing about health economics.
This is not the first time Leonhardt has gotten it wrong.