The healthcare debate has so many angles and issues that it is difficult to grasp. I have recently been reading Easterly's The White Man's Burden about economic development. I have been thinking that the current debate has been dominated by those that Easterly calls planners and not the searches. In this case, planners fail because they lack the information necessary to reform an industry as large and as important as healthcare.
Mankiw has been thinking about healthcare too. Click here to see his NYT article.
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This is a particularly good topic to illustrate the consequences of alternative institutional approaches to decision making.
The Mankiw analysis referred to in this post includes the following comment:
The push for universal coverage is based on the appealing premise that everyone should have access to the best health care possible whenever they need it. That soft-hearted aspiration, however, runs into the hardheaded reality that state-of-the-art health care is increasingly expensive. At some point, someone in the system has to say there are some things we will not pay for. The big question is, who? The government? Insurance companies? Or consumers themselves? And should the answer necessarily be the same for everyone?
Inequality in economic resources is a natural but not altogether attractive feature of a free society. As health care becomes an ever larger share of the economy, we will have no choice but to struggle with the questions of how far we should allow such inequality to extend and what restrictions on our liberty we should endure in the name of fairness.
My colleague Bill Boyes and I have been engaged in an exploration of the tension between the desire for liberty on one hand and the desire for - equality or security on the other hand. This discussion has generated a number of working hypothesis about the incentives at play that lead individual participants in society to voluntarily trade liberty for security.
The health care discussion can be accessed at our blog - Liberty
http://libertyandresponsibility.blogspot.com/search/label/health%20care
There was a great post on this topic over at The Liberal Order
http://www.liberalorder.com/2009/09/socialism-v-capitalism.html#trackback
And finally, a great resource that collects useful sources for a health care debate:
http://www.analysisonline.org/site/aoarticle_section.asp?sec_id=140002434&issue_id=4
Like Scott, I have been blogging on issues related to incentives and performance. A set of posts that relate to both Bill Easterly and this notion of incentives can be viewed over at my blog E Learning for Educators
http://elearningforeducators.blogspot.com/2009/08/understanding-liberty-and-choice.html
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