CONSUMPTION.(The Talk of the Town)(medical care)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 17-APR-06

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COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

Perhaps you have been wondering who or what is to blame for the high cost of medical care in this land of ours--and, more broadly, for the ungainly, unjust mess that is the American health-care system. If so, wonder no more. Your government has fingered the culprit: it's "the vast majority of Americans."

The perp having been collared, the trial held, and the verdict rendered, only the sentencing phase remains. Providentially, our leaders have come up with a punishment that fits the crime. We, the guilty, are to be condemned--or invited, but in any case for the rest of our natural lives, without possibility of parole--to turn over our bodily well-being to "consumer-directed Health Savings Accounts" in conjunction with "high-deductible health policies."

This judgment was handed down last Monday, in the form of an article on the Op-Ed page of the Times. The piece was no Dowdy jestfest or Friedmanesque memo-to-the-mullahs, and not only because of the dreariness of its style and the banality of its content. Its author, Allan...

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