'The Grumpy Economist' Sums Up Paper Presented at Law School Health Care Conference

After the ACA: Freeing the market for health care

This is an essay, based on a talk I gave at the conference, “The Future of Health Care Reform in the United States,” at the University of Chicago Law School. The pdf version on my webpage may be easier to read than this version, which is a bit long for a blog post. Also, I'll update the pdf over time as I collect comments, but not this blog post.

Clearly, two important items on the policy agenda are, if we could get rid of the ACA and Dodd-Frank, what would we replace them with? This essay thinks about ACA, I'll be back on Dodd-Frank. Here goes:

After the ACA: Freeing the market for health care

John H. Cochrane
October 18 2012

Most of the current policy debate, and the optimistically-named “Affordable Care Act,” focuses on health insurance. I think we need to move on to think about the economics of health care. If the ACA is repealed, we still have a mess on our hands, and just fixing insurance will not be enough to clean up that mess.

Read more at The Grumpy Economist