"Consumer-Driven" Health Care

Over at the Century Foundation's Health Beat blog (highly recommended), guest blogger Niko Karvounis pens a brilliant short essay on the flaws in market-based solutions to health care cost containment. It begins by pointing out that 10 percent of "consumers" account for 70 percent of health care costs. They're the people with chronic diseases like diabetes or heart disease, which disproportionately affect the poor and lower middle class. It concludes:

So long as educational disparities persist, painting patients with the broad brushstrokes of market logic is counter-productive because in reality we don't all have the same capacity to be effective in efforts to manage our own care.

As I said, highly recommended, especially for those looking for ammunition for countering the individual choice-health spending account model.