@KlingBlog opened our healthcare sprint's look at tradeoffs with a blunt reading. From 2010 to 2019 US deaths from treatable causes fell 6 percent, while the median of eleven rich peers fell 20 percent, with America beint "worse in spite of higher spending."

"A lot of transfers from the healthy to the sick are inevitably transfers from the economically struggling to the relatively well-off."

"Insurance as cost insulation instead of risk smoothing adds two new layers of social cost. First, patients lose any reason to shop or bargain for cheaper healthcare. Second, providers gain a perfect alibi for telling them nothing about cost."

The most underrated fact about US healthcare is that it is among the most generous systems, even if wildly inefficient.

Arnold Kling in his recent article for the Boyd Institute: "Another way to try to assess whether higher spending on health care reduces mortality is to look at sub-populations in the United States with similar characteristics and different levels of spending. Many studies show little or no effect of higher spending in lowering mortality. This suggests that there is a problem with cost-effectiveness in our health care system."

People in rich countries will just pay more to eek out a few more years of life.

You don't appreciate not having to wait for healthcare enough.