Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise

Health care in the United States has made remarkable advances during the past forty years. Yet our health care system also has several well-known problems: high costs, significant numbers of people without insurance, and glaring gaps in quality and efficiency—and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 is not the answer. This second edition of Healthy, Wealthy, and Wise details a better approach, offering fundamental reform alternatives centering on tax changes, insurance market changes, and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid.

The book proposes five specific reforms to improve the ability of markets to create a lower-cost, higher-quality health care system that is responsive to the needs of individuals, including increasing individual involvement, deregulating insurance markets and redesigning Medicare and Medicaid, improving availability and quality of information, enhancing competition, and reforming the malpractice system. The authors show that, by promoting cost-conscious behavior and competition in both private markets and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid, we can slow the rate of growth of health care costs, expand access to high-quality health care, and slow down runaway spending.

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John F. Cogan is the Leonard and Shirley Ely Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

R. Glenn Hubbard is the Dean and Russell L. Carson Professor of Finance and Economics, Graduate School of Business, and a professor of economics at Columbia University. He is also a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research and a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

Daniel P. Kessler is a professor of economics, law, and policy at the Stanford University Graduate School of Business; a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University; and a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.