The Failings of Modern Health Care

Here are some serious problems about health care that need to be addressed. This is from an article by David Goldhill in The Atlantic:

A wasteful insurance system; distorted incentives; a bias toward treatment; moral hazard; hidden costs and a lack of transparency; curbed competition; service to the wrong customer. These are the problems at the foundation of our health-care system, resulting in a slow rot and requiring more and more money just to keep the system from collapsing.

How would the health-care reform that’s now taking shape solve these core problems? The Obama administration and Congress are still working out the details, but it looks like this generation of “comprehensive” reform will not address the underlying issues, any more than previous efforts did. Instead it will put yet more patches on the walls of an edifice that is fundamentally unsound—and then build that edifice higher.

Goldhill tells his personal tale of tragedy when his healthy but aged father went to the hospital with a problem and then caught an infection from the hospital that killed him. This made him dig a little deeper and he was horrified by a byzantine system with costly high tech procedures but missing basic (and cheap) health care (like basic sanitation!!!) and a paper-based system that has ignored that last 40 years of information technology. It is a farce, but a deadly farce!