See Victor R. Fuchs, ‘Dean’ of American Health Care Economists, Dies at 99: He was among the first to offer a comprehensive explanation, and a possible solution, for the country’s rising health care costs. by Clay Risen of The NY Times. Excerpts:
"It turned out, he found, that health and health care did not, in fact, move in tandem, and that the differences in national outcomes had more to do with culture, environment, social policy and individual choice than with the cost or level of health care. Fancy specialized care, which the U.S. excels at, was no guarantee of better health overall, he contended.
“The access problem involves mostly basic care and emergency care,” he wrote, “and could frequently be met with physicians’ assistants, nurse clinicians and other types of health professionals.”
In 2005 he joined with Ezekiel J. Emanuel, an oncologist and bioethicist, to propose a plan to provide universal health coverage through vouchers, which people would use to purchase basic health insurance. Buying additional coverage would be up to them.
Dr. Fuchs did not hold out hope that their plan would come to fruition. The biggest problem facing the U.S. health care system, he argued, was the unwillingness of politicians and the public to make the hard choices necessary for real change.
He was a strong critic of the Clinton administration’s health care reform efforts in the early 1990s — not because he disagreed with the goal or even some of the proposals, but because he thought the White House was naïve about what actual reform would take.
“The Clinton plan was a combination of ignorance and arrogance, and it turned out to be a disaster,” he told The New York Times in 2000."
"He was equally negative about President Barack Obama’s health care changes a generation later. He said they did nothing to address the underlying causes of high costs and instead simply just shifted those costs around."
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