Brooks has a column in today’s NYT in which he discusses the issue of market failures in the health care system. He notes the arguments against markets and admits they have some validity, but ultimately rejects them because they are largely based on an analysis that is more than fifty years old. He then goes on to say that things are different now, because lots of information is available on line.
The internet will solve our health care problems! Whoo-hoo! I would respond as follows:
- Dismissing a study because it is old is an odd position for someone who claims to be a conservative. I guess we can throw out Plato, Aristotle, and the Bible, too.
- The conclusions that he rejects in the cited study are based on common sense observations that are still accurate today, not on obsolete data.
- If you’ve ever gone on line looking for medical advice for a particular symptom, what you will inevitably find is a host of possible causes and direction to get advice from a doctor, which solves nothing.
- The market does work in some instances. If you have a medical problem that isn’t serious or complicated, you can probably figure it out for yourself and buy over-the-counter medicine to deal with it. There is plenty of information available under those circumstances, there are lots of competing providers, you aren’t in a position where you have to make a decision under very adverse circumstances, and you won’t die if you misdiagnose the problem. For more serious and complex issues, however, you don’t really have any choice but to rely on a doctor or a hospital, and that is where all the market failures–monopolies, inequality of knowledge, the need to rely on someone trustworthy, etc.–come into play. That’s where the money is in our system. The internet isn’t going to make the problem go away.