Yglesias channels his inner Robin Hanson

Matt Yglesias offers wisdom on cutting health care spending.

Still, though waste is a huge element of our insurance spending, insurance-related waste is a relatively small portion of the overall waste–about 14 percent. The biggest chunk of excess spending we’re involved with is spending on “outpatient care.” We pay doctors more than other people do, our doctors order more tests than other doctors do, our tests are more expensive than other people’s tests, and we have many more relatively expensive specialists and relatively few relatively cheap GPs. And we have nothing to show for it.

The prospects for changing this, however, don’t look great to me. People don’t like insurance companies. Taking them on is popular. And nevertheless we see how difficult it is to really hurt their interests. Now imagine taking on the doctor lobby. More money is at stake. And doctors have a much better public image. And doctors and there families are a much bigger voting block than insurance executives and their families. And on top of that, people have a very strong mistaken intuition that getting lots of tests and seeing lots of specialists is in their interests.

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