Starting Health Reform from here

June 2024, Paper: "No one is satisfied with the U.S. health system. In 2022, 26 million Americans were uninsured (Keisler-Starkey et al., 2023). In 2019, life expectancy at birth was 79 years, among the lowest in the Organisation of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), coming in a full 4 years below France (OECD, 2021). All of this is despite the United States devoting 17% of its economy to healthcare, the highest in the OECD and nearly double the average (OECD, 2021).  We are lucky that Liran Einav and Amy Finkelstein, two of their generation’s leading health economists, have turned their attention squarely to these interrelated problems, thinking from first principles about how they would redo America’s health system from scratch. Writing a counterpoint to their proposal is awkward on multiple levels: their book is excellent and should be required reading by specialists and non-specialists alike; I would be perfectly happy if their pro- posal were adopted; and, perhaps most importantly, they know vastly more about this topic than I do. As a result, many of the issues I raise are orthogonal to their arguments and some may well be wrong."