ABSTRACT
The attitude of Washington policymakers toward the crisis in U. S. health-care spending can only be described as schizophrenic. By engineering an open-ended system of benefits, tax subsidies, regulations, and law in which most of are largely insulated from the real cost of our health-care purchases, public policy has transformed the United States into far and away the most profligate health consumer in history. A multitude of federally sponsored groups were called upon to regulate virtually every aspect of the health-care industry's business: whom it could employ, where it could build, and what treatment it could provide. Virtually every other government outside the United States actually "budgets" a more or less fixed amount yearly for total public health-care spending. Then there is the different set of trade-offs surrounding low-probability cures—-situations in which patients are unlikely to survive in any case.
