Personal responsibility and health care spending

We often hear about parental responsibility when it comes to educational success and the overall health of children. But how about personal responsibility when it comes to our broken health care system?

I found this recent article on obesity and health fascinating. Obviously, there are many factors that lead people to be thinner or fatter as a group, but as the author points out, we ultimately have the ability to lose weight or not. Calling obesity a “disease” is thus more of a political designation than a descriptive term relating to health.

And then I saw this article which explained that what American health care lacks is some entity that says “no” when it comes to health care spending. The author makes a compelling case that government really won’t do a better job than the current US system, but that so much health care consumption has no relationship to life expectancy that the US wastes more money than other nations.

Of course, as we have repeatedly argued here and here (for example) that market forces and personal choice will solve the problem of “no” while also achieving high-quality care when it actually matters.