Americans believe that the private sector is always more efficient and cheaper than big government, and particularly when you go among Republicans, even after five beers, they still believe it. But I always say, "If it's really true, why would they need that 12 percent extra on a traditional government program? Explain to me why something that costs more saves me money as a taxpayer.".
Uwe ReinhardtAmericans keep telling me they hate government. I always tell them: "Man, I've got a country for you: Go to Afghanistan; they don't have one." So if you're of that ilk, yes, you can have your private paradise, but if you're comfortable with government, then go with government.
Uwe ReinhardtThere are libertarian values which say private property is the overarching value, the sanctity thereof, and there are egalitarians who say health care should be shared and so on. That's fair enough.
Uwe ReinhardtThe bad things the U.S. health care system are that our financing of health care is really a moral morass in the sense that it signals to the doctors that human beings have different values depending on their income status. For example, in New Jersey, the Medicaid program pays a pediatrician $30 to see a poor child on Medicaid. But the same legislators, through their commercial insurance, pay the same pediatrician $100 to $120 to see their child. How do physicians react to it? If you phone around practices in Princeton, Plainsboro, Hamilton - none of them would see Medicaid kids.
Uwe ReinhardtWe have a nation where the elite thinks it's OK to advocate a war and send the lower-income people to do the fighting. It's natural for such a people to think that the lower-income people should also have a worse health care experience. And the other countries are not there - I always say, not there yet. I tell the Germans and the Swiss, "You're not there yet, but if you're not very, very careful, if we Americans come over there and rearrange ... your health care system, you will be just like us."
Uwe ReinhardtThe [Hobby Lobby Supreme Court] ruling raises the question of why, uniquely in the industrialized world, Americans have for so long favored an arrangement in health insurance that endows their employers with the quasi-parental power to choose the options that employees may be granted in the market for health insurance.
Uwe Reinhardt