The Supreme Court's ruling upholds the indiviual mandate, arguing that congress is using it's taxing powers to financially penalize those that go without insurance.

Similarly, in 2007, conservative economist Greg Mankiw described insurance "mandates" and Bush's 2007 proposed health care reform as taxes or financial incentives for buying health

An interesting essay on the supply of doctors. In short:

1. The U.S. government has direct influence over the supply of doctors through it's funding of residency positions.

"Medicare determines the baseline for doctors' pay, and since most medical students elect to train in the non-primary-care jobs generating the majority of charges, procedure- ( Read more... )

This essay points out that competition in the health care industry tends to increase costs because companies compete by inventing new drugs or hospitals expand to provide more premium services ( Read more... )

It is often argued that the threat of lawsuits makes doctors more likely to prescribe more procedures out of an abundance of caution to avoid malpractice suits; and thus the threat of lawsuits contributes to rising health care costs.

Perhaps, if one could also sue doctors for over-prescribing procedures, there would be a moderating effect on the ( Read more... )

I thought this was a well told story about why the cost of health care varies so much in Vermont. It is a bit long, so the below excerpts highlight the main points of how he explains the variation in health costs:

SPIEGEL: ....The women of Lewiston, Maine, weren't having more hysterectomies because more of them were Catholic or because more of ( Read more... )

I thought this was a thoughtful piece about a market-based health care system.

Update--The link works now.

This short summary from PBS’s Frontline describes how health care is provided in other countries.

In a previous comment, I raised the question about whether a public option would receive government subsidies. Last night Obama’s speech made clear that his version of a public option would be self-sufficient (i.e. no subsidies). Though his comparison to the public education system seems to contradict this. Nonetheless, giving him the benefit of ( Read more... )

John Stewart and Betsy McCaughey debate about the health care bill (mostly) civilly ( Part 1, Part 2,and Part 3). In particular they discuss the notion of "death panels" at the end of Part 1 and beginning of Part 2.

This Washington Post article does a good job of summarizing the main points in about 1,000 words.