Holman on Healthcare

Holman Jenkins exposes a little secret about our healthcare system that Obamacare didn't fix: It's grossly regressive.

Let's step back. ObamaCare is a specific instance of a broader truth about America's health-care policy: It's grossly regressive. The giant tax subsidy for employer-provided health insurance is most rewarding to those in the highest brackets. Medicare is regressive: It transfers money from working people, with few assets, to the elderly, who own most of America's wealth. Even Medicaid, the program for the poor, is morphing into a program for helping the middle class shield its assets from long-term care bills.

The cumulative impact of these interventions has given us the health-care system we have. Because it subsidizes third-party payership, it destroys any hope of price-value comparisons by consumers. Because it commits the cardinal economic impossibility of trying to subsidize everybody, the end result is not better health but higher costs in the form of rising prices and the provision of services of questionable value.

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