"This book should be required reading for anyone who is interested or participating in the shaping of the future structure of the U.S. health care system."
American Journal of Hospital Pharmacy

1992, 1993
The Heartland Institute

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The high cost of health care in the U.S. is the key issue in the national debate over reforming the nation’s health care system. Surveys show that the high cost of employee health care is among business’s highest concerns. The promise of lower costs figured prominently in the American College of Physicians’ call in 1990 for a publicly funded “comprehensive and coordinated program to assure access [to health care] on a nationwide basis.” Critics of U.S. health care routinely focus on the system’s cost and point to European systems, where spending is much less.

Advocates of national health insurance and its twin, socialized medicine, have used the issue of health care costs to build a coalition for their cause. They promise substantial cost savings by adopting a “universal-access single-payer system.” One report even claims that the money saved by nationalizing the health insurance industry would be enough to extend health insurance to the entire population of uninsureds. Organized labor, the elderly, and even some parts of the business community have accepted this rhetoric and climbed on board the nationalization bandwagon.

Why should the advocates of nationalization be believed when they place blame for high cost son the health care industry, rather than on the many other factors that affect the cost of health care? At a time when “privatization” is taking place around the world and across the U.S., why should we believe that a centrally planned and tax-financed system will operate more efficiently than a private health care system?

This book takes aim at the health care spending issue. We ask why costs are high and how we know that spending is “too high.” We challenge the notion that countries with nationalized health care systems have controlled the cost of health care. And we suggest a reform agenda that addresses the real causes of unnecessarily high spending.