Michael Kinsley: To Your Health

Why modest reform is preferable to single-payer health care.

By Michael Kinsley
Posted Friday, March 17, 2006, at 6:08 AM ET

In the March 23 New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman makes the case for a health-care system that is not only "single payer," meaning that the government handles the finances, but in some respects "single provider," meaning that the government supplies the service directly.

Krugman and his co-author, Robin Wells, correctly diagnose the problem with the Bush administration's pet health-care solution of encouraging people (with tax breaks, naturally) to pay for routine care à la carte instead of through insurance. Like Willie Sutton in reverse, this notion goes where the money isn't. Annual checkups and sore throats aren't bankrupting us: It's the gargantuan cost of treating people who are seriously ill. People who can get insurance against that risk would be insane not to, and the government would be insane to encourage them not to.