Policy Spotlight - Healthcare Reform
As healthcare reform legislation has worked its way through the House and Senate, the issue of escalating costs has moved from the center of the debate to the periphery. Rather than focusing on cost control as a central element of reform, lawmakers have proposed dozens of pilot projects that address various aspects of the problem. But does this piecemeal approach have any chance of improving the efficiency of our system? In a thoughtful essay, Boston-based surgeon and writer Atul Gwande draws an analogy between today's healthcare system and the American system of agriculture and food production as it existed a century ago. Over decades, creative collaboration between government and farmers revolutionized U.S. agriculture, vastly improving its productivity and, in the process, reducing household food budgets from an average of 40 percent in 1900 to just 8 percent today. READ MORE