At this point, it’s looking a lot like Walter Duranty’s.

It’s hard to cherry pick when the cherry tree isn’t fruiting.

[Update a few minutes later]

Wrong link, fixed now, sorry.

…is the highest-cost health care in the nation.

Good thing we extended it to the whole country.

The case for it is made by compelling evidence.

Of course, the evidence is compelling only to those interested in actual results, as opposed to running other peoples’ lives.

And it is when, not if. It presents an opportunity to finally fix problems with the system dating back seven decades:

There is an alternative. A much freer market in health care and health insurance can work, can deliver high quality, technically innovative care at much lower cost, and solve the pathologies of the pre-existing system.

The U.S. health-care market is dysfunctional. Obscure prices and $500 Band-Aids are legendary. The reason is simple: Health care and health insurance are strongly protected from competition. There are explicit barriers to entry, for example the laws in many states that require a “certificate of need” before one can build a new hospital. Regulatory compliance costs, approvals, nonprofit status, restrictions on foreign doctors and nurses, limits on medical residencies, and many more barriers keep prices up and competitors out. Hospitals whose main clients are uncompetitive insurers and the government cannot innovate and provide efficient cash service.

We need to permit the Southwest Airlines, LUV -0.19% Wal-Mart, WMT +0.22% Amazon.com AMZN +1.11% and Apples of the world to bring to health care the same dramatic improvements in price, quality, variety, technology and efficiency that they brought to air travel, retail and electronics. We’ll know we are there when prices are on hospital websites, cash customers get discounts, and new hospitals and insurers swamp your inbox with attractive offers and great service.

…Health insurance should be individual, portable across jobs, states and providers; lifelong and guaranteed-renewable, meaning you have the right to continue with no unexpected increase in premiums if you get sick. Insurance should protect wealth against large, unforeseen, necessary expenses, rather than be a wildly inefficient payment plan for routine expenses.

People want to buy this insurance, and companies want to sell it. It would be far cheaper, and would solve the pre-existing conditions problem. We do not have such health insurance only because it was regulated out of existence.

Time to make a clear distinction between “health care” and true insurance, and let the market work. Instead, as always, we try to fix a mess caused by regulations with more regulations. This time, I hope it was a bridge too far.

Daniel Hannan has a good piece on the NHS:

The elision of the “hardworking doctors and nurses” with the state monopoly that employs them is what allows opponents of reform to shout down any criticism. People who complain are treated, not as wronged consumers, but as pests. People who argue that there might be a better way of organising the system are treated, not as proponents of a different view, but as enemies.

Any organisation that is spared criticism becomes, over time, inefficient, insensitive, intolerant. It has happened to the United Nations. It has happened to the mega-charities. It happened, for a long time, to the European Union (though not over the past five years). The more lofty the ideal, the more reluctant people are to look at the grubby reality.

We can’t let that happen here. I’m sure that many of the people behind this legislative atrocity would love to jail its critics, if they could.

Thoughts on the current health-care mess from Walter Russell Mead.