If you want to understand our health cost problems, you should read this Atlantic article by David Goldhill.

Here's the heart of his argument:

I'm a Democrat, and have long been concerned about America's lack of a health safety net.  But based on my own work experience, I also believe that unless we fix the problems at the foundation of our health system—largely problems of incentives—our reforms won't do much good, and may do harm.  To achieve maximum coverage at acceptable cost with acceptable quality, health care will need to become subject to the same forces that have boosted efficiency and value throughout the economy.  We will need to reduce, rather than expand, the role of insurance; focus the government's role exclusively on things that only government can do (protect the poor, cover us against true catastrophe, enforce safety standards, and ensure provider competition); overcome our addiction to Ponzi-scheme financing, hidden subsidies, manipulated prices, and undisclosed results; and rely more on ourselves, the consumers, as the ultimate guarantors of good service, reasonable prices, and sensible trade-offs between health-care spending and spending on all the other good things money can buy.

As I mentioned in this post, I have made similar arguments over the years, but I have never put them together in one big post.

By the way, you don't have to take just my word that this article is worth reading.  On today's Gang of Four show, David Horsey recommended the article and said, though not in these words, that it had made him rethink his support for the current Democratic health insurance "reform" proposals.

Because the article is so long, and because I want you to think about it, I'm going to close the comments over the weekend.  On Monday, I will either open up the post, or put up a brand new post just for comments on the article.  (Later next week, I will put up a guest post by a person who favors the current Democratic proposals.)