There is declining competitiveness in some large important markets and its driving up costs: healthcare (with pharma) is the most important, but not only, dysfunctional market.
We need to:
Reform the dysfunctional healthcare market (it will take 30 years) bringing in changes that increase market transparency and better balance market power of sellers and buyers (whether single or multi-payer) so as to generate normal market tensions and, by doing so, close the gaping healthcare costliness gap with other countries.
Crunchy but ‘left’
Single payer/universal healthcare
Crunchy but ‘right’
Effectively regulated market.
The question of universal healthcare is a left/right battleground
Crunchicrant does not see this as the most important issue in the healthcare arena: much more important are the failings of the healthcare market, which makes healthcare provision in the US inefficient.
However healthcare is accessed (the universal healthcare debate is about access to healthcare), the US needs efficient and effective healthcare provision, and whether it is a single payer universal access system, or a system like today’s hybrid model of private and government payers the real problem is the absence of the tensions normal in a market, between buyers and sellers, essential to market functionality.
Crunchicrant is not dainty in advocating more intervention to balance a market that is, as it exists today, ripping off the American people; the country cannot afford to be dainty, either.
What would the industry suggest we do?
Crunchicrant sets out its course of therapy here: [Healthcare market – how to fix it]
