Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org

where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to

another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd

love to hear from you. My guest today is Arnold Kling, who blogs at econlog, part of the Library

of Economics and Liberty. Arnold has written on a wide variety of economic topics and is the author

of learning economics and his most recent book is a crisis of abundance, rethinking how we pay

for health care. And that's our topic for today. Arnold, welcome to econ Talk. Thanks. I enjoyed

listening to your broadcast. Arnold, what do you mean by a crisis of abundance? Sounds like an

oxymoron. Well, it's meant to sound like an oxymoron. I note that we could actually pay for the

health care that we had in the 1970s, which was pretty decent health care, and we could pay for it

pretty easily. But what we have now is an abundance of specialists and high-tech medical equipment,

and paying for that has become more difficult. So you see the increase in health care expenditure,

which a lot of people bemoan as the result of improvements in both the type of people who

administer health care and the tools that they have to use. Well, I'd have to be careful about

attributing it to improvements, because it's not clear that we've gotten enough bang for

the buck in terms of health care. And I would say, in fact, that when I began writing the book,

there was this puzzle that the US spends so much more on health care than other countries,

and the other countries have longevity that's as good or better. And when I started writing the

book, I was actually looking for evidence that to resolve that puzzle in our favor, and I didn't

find much evidence of that sort, so I could be a little cautious on that. But we do have, quote,

better diagnostic tools. We have a wider array of pharmaceutical interventions that are possible.

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