David Cutler asks this excellent question. His answer:
I identify two factors as being particularly important in organizational stagnation: public insurance programs that are oriented to volume of care and not value, and inadequate information about quality of care. Recent reforms have aspects that bear on these problems.
Not once in the 43 pages of the paper does the word “regulation” appear. Not once in the 43 pages of the paper does the word “license” appear. Not once in the 43 pages of the paper does the term “American Medical Association” appear. In regard to the second of his observations – just think of how massive an opportunity “inadequate information about quality” would represent in any other market. Would it not be moderately academic to ask why such an inadequacy exists? It must be because he is smarter than us – being on Team Obama and from Harvard and all that. When I grow up perhaps I too will understand the complexity of the health care system.
He clearly has full-boat Blue Cross, which he thinks is paid by somenone else, or at least he understands that is part of his salary, and regards it as an entitlement. Tell Rachel this is his ever-refillable boppa.
I give the quotation a C- at best. The reader is left to speculate on what he means. I’ve read through it four times now, including the phrase “organizational stagnation” and have a hard time imagining to which organization he refers, except it must be somewhere in the health industry. I might speculate that he thinks doctors are too highly paid, or that drug companies ought to take losses on their drugs and still fund their research in the promise of even bigger losses. Or maybe he thinks free-market capitalism is the best road to prosperity.
Check that. At least one can read through the B.S. the indirect, indefensible point he attempts.