Patients are not consumers: the “original sin” of American health care

Greg Scandlen has an excellent post on American health care expenditures relative to those of other nations here. Folks on the left constantly talk about how much the US spends on health care and to an extent they have a point.

Problem is that, as the following chart illustrates (from Scandlen’s blog posting), Americans do not directly spend much on health care. Rather, the spending is done by governments and insurance companies:

How can this be rectified? Well, the first thing to be done is to equalize the tax treatment of health care so that employers are not given the incentive to buy insurance for their employers and that individuals take control for more of their health care spending.