Is More Medicine Better?

Americans famously spend on average more on medicine than the people of other developed nations, but seem to get no better results. Could it be that medical spending is worth less than we think?

In this month’s Cato Unbound, the iconoclastic George Mason economist Robin Hanson leads off with an essay that argues that “our main problem in health policy is a huge overemphasis on medicine.” Hanson points to a spate of studies — especially the huge RAND health insurance experiment — to show that “in the aggregate, variations in medical spending usually show no statistically significant medical effect on health.” Hanson lays down the gauntlet and “dares” other health policy experts to publicly agree or disagree with this seemingly well-confirmed claim and its implications for policy. For Hanson, those implications are clear: “Cutting half of medical spending would seem to cost little in health, and yet would free up vast resources for other health and utility gains.”

Will America’s health policy experts step up to Hanson’s challenge? We’ve got three of the very best lined up to respond. This month’s gold-plated panel includes David Cutler, the Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics and Dean for the Social Sciences at Harvard University; Dana Goldman, the RAND Chair in Health Economics and Director of Health Economics at RAND; and Alan Garber, a VA physician and the Henry J. Kaiser Jr. Professor at Stanford, Professor of Medicine, and Director of the university’s Center for Health Policy.

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