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The Return of HillaryCare

Socialized medicine is still not a good idea.

May 23, 2005, Vol. 10, No. 34 • By DAVID GRATZER
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PAUL KRUGMAN HAS BEEN USING his space on the New York Times op-ed page for weeks now to discuss America's "real crisis"--not Social Security but health care. Krugman deplores the horrid state of American medicine, the large number of uninsured, and the high cost of it all. He claims that "the private sector is often bloated and bureaucratic" and finds solace in the supposed outperformance of other countries' "universal" systems. Sound familiar? If the Princeton economist turned pundit is any indicator, HillaryCare is back on the radar.

Krugman is not alone in his nostalgia. The Los Angeles Times muses wistfully that HillaryCare may not have been such a bad idea. Arnold Relman, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, describes the problems of American medicine in a 7,500-word essay for the New Republic, concluding that markets don't work. Matt Miller, a centrist in the Clinton administration's OMB, argues in Fortune that government-financed health care is a winning political idea--for Republicans.

But government-run health care didn't make sense for America in 1994, and it still doesn't. Krugman's arguments are enticing. But they gloss over basic facts. Consider:

Americans tend to believe that we have the best health care system in the world. . . . But it isn't true. We spend far more per person on health care . . . yet rank near the bottom among industrial countries in indicators from life expectancy to infant mortality.

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