I shared last year a matrix to illustrate Milton Friedman’s great insight about the superior results achieved by markets compared to government.
Incentives explain why markets work best. When you spend your own money on yourself (box 1), you try to maximize quality while minimizing cost. And that drives the businesses that are competing for your money to constantly seek more efficient ways of producing better products at better prices.
This system generates creative destruction, which sometimes can be painful, but the long-term result is that we are vastly richer.
Governments, by contrast, don’t worry about efficiency or cost (box 4).
Today, though, let’s use Friedman’s matrix to understand the shortcomings of the US healthcare system. Way back in 2009,
I opined that the most important chart in healthcare was the one showing that American consumers directly paid for less than 12 percent of health expenditures.
For all…
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