ABSTRACT
This chapter is concerned with policy questions about the best way to deliver subsidized goods and services–food, shelter, health care, schooling–to eligible individuals. In fact, vouchers may be less subject to fraudulent use, because there are many buyers–individual citizens equipped with vouchers–and many sellers of services, and the sheer magnitude of the system would make it very difficult for collusion to occur on a very large scale. Individual voucher holders would pay a certain amount for the transportation vouchers, just as food stamp purchasers pay some discounted amount of the face value of food stamps. Medicare is a voucher system in the sense that patients can pick and choose their own doctors, pharmacists, and hospitals, and they are not forced to go to a government clinic or a single supplier. The medicaid program is probably less practical than medicare, because medicaid recipients–people living in poverty–are concentrated in areas which have few medical services.
