Wrangling Long-Term Costs

Ezra Klein, on education & health care costs:

I’m not going to end this post with some wan paragraph explaining how to transform these two industries into something closer to their potential. My ideas on health-care reform are available elsewhere on the blog and I don’t know enough about education to say anything worthwhile. But if you asked me to paint an optimistic picture of the American economy over the next three or four decades, the story I’d tell you would mainly be about how we finally figured out how to drag health care and education into the 21st century. And if you asked me to paint you a pessimistic story of the next three or four decades, it’d be about how we failed to do that, and the two sectors continued eating up more and more of our money while delivering less and less value.

Well, good news, Ezra! Those two sectors are increasingly coming under bureaucratic government control, so I’m just sure we’ll figure out the answers to these hard problems! It’s not like Washington has any history of eating up more and more of our money while delivering less and less value