For the health care debate that has been rag­ing in Amer­ica of late, I have sub­scribed to the same phi­los­o­phy as Ben Cas­nocha:

I’ve decided I’m just going to read it about once it’s resolved.

You can’t keep up with every­thing. Rather than lightly fol­low along and skim arti­cles and pre­tend to be informed, I’m con­sciously opt­ing out. I rarely do this when it comes to cur­rent affairs — I’m kind of a junkie — but I must say, this time around, it feels liberating.

The debate was also cov­ered widely here in the UK and cov­er­age has, at last, died down. As such I decided it was time to start read­ing about the progress to date, and came across David Goldhill’s exten­sive and pen­e­trat­ing piece in The Atlantic that, as Alex J Mann rightly says, con­tains “every­thing you need to or should know [about the health care debate]”.

The piece begins with this admission;

I’m a busi­ness­man, and in no sense a health-care expert. But the per­sis­tence of bad indus­try practices—from long lines at the doctor’s office to ever-rising prices to aston­ish­ing num­bers of pre­ventable deaths—seems beyond all nor­mal logic, and must have an under­ly­ing cause. There needs to be a busi­ness rea­son why an indus­try, year in and year out, would be able to get away with poor cus­tomer ser­vice, unaf­ford­able prices, and uneven results—a rea­son my father and so many oth­ers are unnec­es­sar­ily killed.

and con­tin­ues with the fol­low­ing state­ment that really won me over:

So before explor­ing alter­na­tive poli­cies, let’s reex­am­ine our basic assump­tions about health care—what it actu­ally is, how it’s financed, its account­abil­ity to patients, and finally its rela­tion­ship to the eter­nal laws of sup­ply and demand.