My favorite passage in chapter 8 of Goldhill’s Catastrophic Care:
Whatever their own mistakes, our experts are required to try to make health care work without shattering our illusions. It is a job that forces them to create an ever more complicated, ever less comprehensible, ever less functioning system. We can blame them for the system’s addiction to complexity, but it’s the inevitable cost of our own denial.
My least favorite:
[N]o study has ever demonstrated a real link between lack of insurance and poor health results. […] And not for lack of trying.
This passage takes us to an endnote that reads, in part,
But as Megan McArdle argued in The Atlantic, the original studies on which all later estimates were based have a fundamental problem: they didn’t properly control for other factors that significantly affect the death rate with or without insurance (“Myth Diagnosis,” March 2010).
Oh no! There is much more to this than Goldhill or McArdle told readers. Follow the link. I stopped subscribing to The Atlantic over this. Should I stop reading Goldhill’s book too? I admit, I am tempted. Notwithstanding some of the good points he has made, this is very disappointing.
Other posts in this series are under the Catastrophic Care tag.
