This forum has noted in the past some criticism of the arguments put forward in the book Freakonomics. But author and University of Chicago professor Steven Levitt seems to be on track when he shares his concerns about ObamaCare in the latest Money magazine:
The law fails to address any of the important questions about health care. People are not paying on the margin for the health care that they are receiving — after they pay their premiums, the insurance picks up the tab. When neither the doctors nor the patients are directly paying for health care, people have no incentive to make careful decisions about how to spend money on the margin. That’s one reason we spend 15% of GDP on health care.
A reasonable health care reform would shift the incentives so that when I go and get expensive health care, I pay enough of the costs to get me to think twice about whether the benefits outweigh the costs.
