What are some ways to reduce health care costs?
The only way to reduce health care expenditures is to reduce the utilization of services, and to do that, there are two options: We can either get people to voluntarily choose less or we can put a structure in place that withholds treatment using rationing, administrative rules, or something like that. As an economist, I believe in markets and I believe in consumer sovereignty; that is, consumers are the best judge of what’s in their best interest. I think the best way to solve a problem like this is to have well-educated consumers guarding their own pocketbooks. The other option is a public plan that has government employees telling us what services we can and cannot utilize. Can you explain the president’s plan for a public insurance option? What the president wants to do is to have a public option, not unlike Medicare, to compete with private insurance companies. The idea being that this would be, in some cases, the insurer of last resort for folks who couldn’t get private health in
