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To show that high cost of health care is not a problem, consider the following thought experiment: if you never visited the doctor but were healthy, would you be unhappy? Similarly, if we had no school system, but every person developed useful skills, would we be worse off?

Premature narrowing of the problem also leads you to solutions that might be counterproductive. For example, to reduce the cost of health care (or at least prevent further increases), we could deliberately stifle innovation. This would reduce costs because instead of spending $250,000/person on the (to be invented) Alzheimers cure, we just spend $10k/year warehousing them and waiting for them to die.

This is a partial solution to the stated problem of high costs. It isn't a solution to the real problem of poor health.




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