Health Care

America's health-care crisis has a very simple solution, said Paul Krugman and Robin Wells in The New York Review of Books. It's 'œhonest-to-God socialized medicine.' Our current system is now collapsing under the weight of its inefficiency, soaring cost, and poor quality of care. Health care now consumes 16 percent of our total national spending, with much of that cost going to private insurers. Employers are beginning to rebel against paying $10,000 a year to insure each employee. As employers withdraw coverage, the nation's legion of uninsured—already at 46 million people—is growing. No halfway measures will solve this mess, which is why it's time to move to a simpler, single-payer system, funded by taxpayer dollars. Canada, the U.K., and France already have such systems, and they spend far less on health care than the U.S. now does, with longer life expectancy and lower infant mortality. Sooner or later, America will wind up with national health insurance. Why wait until the crisis is even worse?

A single-payer system may sound better on paper, said Michael Kinsley in The Washington Post. But that doesn't mean socialized medicine won't create vexing new problems of its own. All citizens would get equal access to standard medical care—but what of special treatments for special illnesses? In any single-payer system, the government would be forced to 'œration' care, denying expensive treatments to the very old and very sick. People probably wouldn't be allowed to buy better health care on their own. Is that the road Americans really want to take? We should start with smaller reforms that avoid the 'œunbearable trade-offs' of a health-care system in which one size fits all.

The solution isn't more government control, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial. It's less. Health-care costs are soaring for the simple reason that the government and employers pay for most of it, with the actual 'œconsumers' paying no attention to prices. That means hospitals and doctors have no incentive to get costs under control. President Bush's strategy is to get consumers to pay for more of their own health care through Health Savings Accounts. Americans would pay no taxes on income they invested in these accounts, which they'd use to pay for much of their medical care. Want proof that this approach would work? Look at Lasik, the popular eye surgery. It's not covered by insurance plans, so competition has driven the average price of Lasik down 20 percent in five years (at the same time other medical spending went up 44 percent). 'œThe market works.' Let's give it a fighting chance.

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