A. Barton Hinkle on How Bureaucracy and Big Government Ruined American Health Care
Among the many maddening things about the American health care market, writes A. Barton Hinkle, few are so exasperating as its baroque and opaque pricing. The typical hospital bill makes the untranslatable Voynich manuscript seem like a child's grade-school reader by comparison.
Such complexity is partly owing to a simple fact: Not only are there countless big-government regulations in place, much of the market is managed by huge, bureaucratic organizations that employ thousands of people to do nothing all day but grind through minutiae.