Cost Containment

Cost-containment. It’s a topic that comes up pretty regularly when discussing America’s health-care system.  It’s too expensive here! Medical spending is out of control! Etc, etc.  But when liberal health care advocates talk about cost-containment, they rarely seem to recognize what’s really driving up medical spending: medical care, especially that which makes us medical technology’s bleeding edge. Arnold Kling, whose book, Crisis of Abundance, is one of (if not the best) guides to the American health care system today, puts this rather succinctly over at his blog:

Where costs are coming from is more medical procedures. If you’re serious about cutting costs in government-funded health care programs, then you’re serious about having government say “no” to a lot of procedures where now it says “yes.”

This isn’t to say that there’s absolutely no fat in the system, but when people talk about containing medical costs, they’re, sort of obviously,  talking about spending less on it. In any other arena, spending less on something would quite naturally lead to getting less of it. No one from the "health-care is too expensive" camp really wants to admit this, of course, but it’s something to remember next time you hear someone claiming we can have it all and pay less for it.