Henry Aaron on Health Care Costs

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4.7 • 4.3K Ratings

🗓️ 15 November 2007

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

In this bonus middle-of-the-week podcast, Henry Aaron of the Brookings Institution talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about health care costs. Researchers in a New England Journal of Medicine article have estimated that the US could save $209 billion if the US went to a single-payer system like Canada. Is this number reliable? Aaron takes a deeper look at the estimate and discusses the relevance of such estimates for health care policy. This is a special mid-week podcast. It's a follow-up to an earlier podcast with Arnold Kling that raised the issue of administrative costs and potential savings from going to a single-payer system. It also ties in with recent discussions here at EconTalk about the challenges of accurate measurement in the social sciences. We hope you enjoy it. If not, come back Monday when our regular schedule resumes.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts
0:13.9	of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is econtalk.org
0:21.2	where you can subscribe, find other episodes, comment on this podcast, and find links to
0:26.5	another information related to today's conversation. Our email address is mailadicontalk.org. We'd
0:33.6	love to hear from you. The podcast you're listening to is a little bit of an experiment. We've
0:41.8	been releasing econ talk on the web every Monday morning for the low-over-year. But this
0:47.1	podcast is a bonus. It's an in-depth look at the issue of administrative costs under a single
0:52.4	pair of healthcare system and how much money might be saved if the US adopted a system more
0:57.2	like Canada's. The issue came up in my conversation with Arnold Kling a few weeks ago and I thought
1:02.7	it would be interesting to go into it in more depth. So I interviewed Henry Aaron of the Brookings
1:07.0	Institution and along the way we also talked about the role of insurance in healthcare reform.
1:12.4	It's a little short of the usual, just over 35 minutes. If the topic isn't of interest to you,
1:17.3	we'll have our regular Monday release in a few days, a full-length conversation with Cass Sunstein
1:22.1	about worst-case scenarios, dealing with low probability, catastrophic events. And if you like
1:28.3	the idea of a bonus, a extra podcast, particularly one that goes into more detail on a particular issue,
1:34.0	like this one, please let me know via email mailadicontalk.org. Thanks. A couple of weeks ago, I interviewed
1:44.0	Arnold Kling and we talked about the economics of healthcare. One of the issues that came up is the
1:49.6	high cost of the US system, relative to other countries, and how little those extra expenditures
1:55.2	appeared with increased life expectancy. In an earlier podcast, Rob Enhancin and I discussed
2:00.4	the same issue. There are a number of possible explanations why expenditures may not lead to longer
2:04.9	life. Perhaps the effects haven't been measured correctly. Perhaps Americans spend a lot more in
2:09.6	healthcare than other nations and in return receive a higher quality life. But one response to the
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