Pretty much everyone in the U.S. agrees that the American health care system is not working for patients. The disagreement comes over what to do about it. For many, the solution is to expand insurance access and implement price controls.
But on this episode of the “First Opinion Podcast,” Charles M. Silver, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law and an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute, argued that we need a much bigger change.
“The system is really set up to move money. It does it a phenomenally good job of moving money into the health care sector,” he said. But it’s not doing a good job at keeping Americans healthy and keeping costs down.
Instead, he proposed, the U.S. should have a market-based system, just as we do for many other sectors of the economy. Insurance would still play a role, but a far more limited one. “I have homeowners’ insurance, as I’m sure anybody who owns a home pretty much does. But homeowners’ insurance doesn’t pay to repaint my house,” he said.
We discussed what this system would look like for health care consumers, how Social Security offers a model, and how realistic the proposal actually is.
Our conversation was based on his recent First Opinion essay, “The entire U.S. health care system must be torn down and rebuilt.”
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