Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Yuval Levin thinks that the Simpson-Bowles deficit commission’s failure to take on healthcare is its biggest weakness. I agree! But then he goes on to say this:

Obamacare itself cannot just be reformed, because it is deeply rooted in exactly the wrong idea about how to control health-care costs….It puts into practice the notion that the way to make health-care financing more efficient is to make it a centralized system managed largely by the government, so that the only way to really squeeze costs is to tighten price controls.

If you do not think that this is how economic efficiency happens, then you cannot expect any form of this approach to address the basic problem with American health care, and indeed you would expect this approach to result in lower quality and less readily available care.

It’s remarkable that conservatives can continue saying stuff like this. Every other advanced country in the world has a centralized healthcare system that largely controls costs via government mandates. And guess what? It demonstrably works. Every other advanced country in the world has significantly lower costs than ours and provides more readily available care, and nearly all of them provide healthcare that’s at least as good or better than ours.

The chart on the right has been making the rounds lately, and it shows the healthcare cost situation pretty clearly. We’ve always been near the top of the pack compared to other countries, but around 1980 U.S. healthcare costs started to explode. While other countries have seen their costs rise about 50% or so over the past 30 years, ours have skyrocketed, nearly doubling as a percent of GDP.

If you break this down, you can try to figure out exactly which costs are responsible for this rise. But the big picture is clear: other countries had centralized systems that controlled costs and we didn’t. And the centralized systems worked: they reined in costs while continuing to provide extremely high-quality healthcare. You might not like that from an ideological perspective, but from a practical one you can hardly deny that it worked pretty well.

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

AN IMPORTANT UPDATE

We’re falling behind our online fundraising goals and we can’t sustain coming up short on donations month after month. Perhaps you’ve heard? It is impossibly hard in the news business right now, with layoffs intensifying and fancy new startups and funding going kaput.

The crisis facing journalism and democracy isn’t going away anytime soon. And neither is Mother Jones, our readers, or our unique way of doing in-depth reporting that exists to bring about change.

Which is exactly why, despite the challenges we face, we just took a big gulp and joined forces with the Center for Investigative Reporting, a team of ace journalists who create the amazing podcast and public radio show Reveal.

If you can part with even just a few bucks, please help us pick up the pace of donations. We simply can’t afford to keep falling behind on our fundraising targets month after month.

Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery said it well to our team recently, and that team 100 percent includes readers like you who make it all possible: “This is a year to prove that we can pull off this merger, grow our audiences and impact, attract more funding and keep growing. More broadly, it’s a year when the very future of both journalism and democracy is on the line. We have to go for every important story, every reader/listener/viewer, and leave it all on the field. I’m very proud of all the hard work that’s gotten us to this moment, and confident that we can meet it.”

Let’s do this. If you can right now, please support Mother Jones and investigative journalism with an urgently needed donation today.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate