Over the past week, David Gratzer of the Manhattan Institute and Jonathan Cohn of the New Republic have been engaged in a fascinating debate over health care reform, hosted at TNR’s website. The two agree that American health care has serious problems, including a large uninsured population and very high costs. But they disagree about whether government-funded systems in other countries offer a model America should follow.
Their debate basically comes down to a disagreement about health-quality statistics. But both Cohn and Gratzer ignore almost entirely the attitude of the American public toward bureaucracy in health care. Recent experience suggests that Americans would be very unlikely to put up with even the modest constraints on doctors and patients in the French system that Cohn proposes as a model (let alone the overwhelmingly burdensome constraints employed in some other state-funded systems, like those in Canada and Britain).
