by Willard Gaylin

The debate over the current crisis in health care often seems to swirl like a dust storm, generating little but further obfuscation as it drearily goes around and around. And no wonder. Attempts to explain how

we got into this mess—and it is a mess—seem invariably to begin in precisely the wrong place. Most experts have been focusing on the failures and deficiencies of modern medicine. The litany is familiar: greedy physicians, unnecessary procedures, expensive technologies, and so on. Each of these certainly adds its pennyweight to the scales. But even were we to make angels out of doctors and philanthropists out of insurance company executives, we would not stem the rise of health-care costs. That is because this increase, far from being a symptom of modern medicine’s failure, is a product of its success.

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