A Statistician on Healthcare

Here is a post worth reading from FiveThirtyEight, on the subject of healthcare reform. I have to admit that I am not such a policy junkie that I have been following the various proposals that have been floating around the halls of Congress lately.

Unfortunately, I feel that the healthcare reform debate has (yet again) been stymied by the extremists of the spectrum. Listening to the rhetoric, one feels that the choices on the table are either demanding no change (because our non-system is working so well), or change pushing us towards a British model of healthcare. Now, obviously none of the bills in Congress are that extreme, and most call for some hybrid public-private model. I think that the healthcare systems of Germany and Swtizerland (essentially, private markets for mandatory care where a public provider operates to varying degrees among private ones) should be more closely examined by Americans. Definitely the government subsidy for employer-based insurance needs to be eliminated, and costs need to be brought down (I refer to you Pace for more on those matters). And most importantly, the United States needs to find a way to institute such a plan without dramatically increasing an already-dramatically increasing deficit. Because any government plan will be expensive. All government programs need to be put on the table for review, including defense and entitlement.