Brooks: Healthcare bills don’t address costs

Nobody amongst Washington’s elected establishment wants to use the words “cost containment,” let alone “rationing,” for either describing the problems with our current healthcare system, or what needs to be part of national healthcare. David Brooks does a pretty decent job of taking on medical costs in today’s America as well as noting how healthcare bills in Congress aren’t written to rein it in.

As Alec MacGillis reported in a front-page piece in The Washington Post this week, “All signs in Washington suggest that cost considerations will be kept at arm’s length as health-care legislation moves forward.” As my colleague David Leonhardt wrote in his column this week, “The current health care system is hard-wired to be bloated and inefficient,” and health care economists don’t see the current bills doing enough to fix that.

That said, the column’s not prefect. Brooks fails to note that this lack of cost control starts with inflated med school costs. (It takes about twice as much money to go to med school here as in much of Western Europe.) But, that won’t fit his free market system. If we’re going to address this issue, we have to start at the bottom.

I suspect that U.S. medical schools have become ever-more like hospitals — buying new equipment, etc., to compete with each other.