Increasing Productivity In Health Care And Lowering Costs

An interesting article in The Journal of the American Enterprise Institute, "Baumol’s Solution to the Baumol Effect" by Tim Worstall, Thursday, September 10, 2009.

The solution to our healthcare cost problem is to use more technology and high tech solutions and not less as proposed by some, such as Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. An excerpt from the article:

What we really want to do is to routinize and mechanize as much of the medical process as we can, and the one spur, the workable incentive, that we know encourages this is that combination of greed, profits, the division of labor and specialization, and the urge to find cheaper ways of doing things which comes from that odd but unique interaction of capitalism and markets.

It is a basic truism that if you do not identify the source or cause of a problem then you cannot discover a workable solution to said problem. The current laboring of the elephant will indeed produce a mouse to address the perceived problems of healthcare unless we grasp the basic points—that we want more, not less, high-tech medicine and that to get from here to there we have to harness both markets and capitalism to our desires, not attempt to abolish them from the system.

Read the complete article here.