Brooks vs. Yglesias

David Brooks thinks the government can't make Medicare work better:

if 15 Washington-based experts really can save a system as vast as Medicare through a process of top-down control, then this will be the only realm of human endeavor where that sort of engineering actually works.

But as Matt Yglesias points out, this is wrong on two counts. First, as I never tire of saying, more strongly governmental health care systems really are cheaper (see the chart above). Second, our government does lots of complex things well. Consider the Apollo program, or World War II. Does David Brooks think that World War II was not complex, or that our government failed at fighting it?

Brooks also thinks that nobody really knows, at this point, which approach to Medicare cost control would work better, so people are just "reflecting their overall worldviews." No doubt this is fair about many politicians, and it is probably fair about most people in most situations, but I am not a socialist. If it were up to me, I would reduce government involvement in dozens of areas. But there really is good data on whose health care system delivers better value, and it isn't ours.