Let’s spend more on health care?

That’s what David Cutler argues in his recent book Your Money or Your Life.

Cutler believes that our expenditures on health care have more than justified their cost. He therefore opposes the traditional recipe of “cut costs and use the savings to finance greater access.” His attitude is closer to “expand care now and improve the quality of outcomes.” If you think that more discretionary spending doesn’t make many people much happier, why not make them healthier and longer-lived instead?

As I read the book, Cutler is pushing two major ideas:

1. Subsidize insurance to ease the problems of the forty million uninsured. But he repeats the usual numbers, without convincing me that the problem is as bad as it sounds.

2. Pay for health care results, rather than rewarding expenditures per se. In other words, give doctors and hospitals bonuses for actually making patients better.

A loyal reader of MR should not be surprised to read that Robin Hanson had the idea first. Read his intriguing essay at the link. In Robin’s vision you buy your medical care from an institution that contracts with a third party to pay penalties, or receive bonuses, depending on your longevity, disability, et.c — whatever can be measured. I can imagine such incentive schemes working in the decentralized private sector, especially after much trial and error experimentation. (Note the potential adverse selection problem: you don’t want providers to have an incentive to shun hard-to-improve cases.) It is much harder to see federal or even state governments getting the incentives right, and having the political capital to see the correct decisions through.

The bottom line? Cutler is obviously a smart guy but overall I found the book underargued. I like his optimistic, can-do attitude, but I don’t trust it in the hands of politicians.