The Top 10 Reasons for Soaring Health-Care Costs

by Charles WheelanUtility Links * Printable View * Email this PageWednesday, March 1, 2006[Charles Wheelan, Ph.D.]What's the most intractable public policy problem the U.S. faces? Health care. I don't think any other issue even comes close. Health care has all the ideological fireworks of social issues like abortion or gay marriage (e.g. is health care a right or a privilege?). Yet the system itself -- the process of providing care and allocating those costs -- is also stunningly complex.Health care is increasingly expensive because of powerful, perhaps inexorable economic forces that make medical care different than all other goods and services in a modern economy. Here are my top 10 reasons for why health care is so expensive -- and likely to get even more expensive in the future, regardless of what patches we put on the system.

The Top 10 Reasons for Soaring Health-Care Costs: The Naked Economist - Yahoo! Finance