The hard truth about health care

By Ezra Klein,
WashPost
Published: June 6

Everyone in Washington claims to want the same thing lately: a “serious conversation” about health-care costs. So let’s have one.

Republicans have a plan that has been tried repeatedly but that has never worked. Democrats have a plan that might work in theory, but it is untested at the scale they’ll need for it to work in practice. And both parties are too scared to talk about the only plan that has worked.

But before we get to that plan, I want to tell you about a graph.

I found it buried inside a Kaiser Family Foundation brief entitled “Health Care Spending in the United States and Selected OECD Countries.” Inauspicious, maybe. But it should change the way we think about health-care costs. Because what it shows is that we’ve failed. Failed to control costs. Failed to restrain the growth of government.

(More here.)