David Goldhill, Columnist

America’s Health Care Is a Mess, but It’s Our Mess

June 20, 2013 at 10:00 PM UTC

David Goldhill, the president and chief executive officer of the cable TV network GSN, is the author of “Catastrophic Care: How American Health Care Killed My Father -- and How We Can Fix It.”

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It’s a simple truism, often repeated, that other developed nations achieve better health outcomes than the U.S. does despite spending less money on care.

A June 16 column in the New York Times was typical: “What Sweden Can Tell Us About Obamacare.” Sweden spends less than half on health care per capita as the U.S., the author, Cornell University economist Robert Frank, points out, but achieves better outcomes by responding “efficiently” to treating illness, utilizing economies of scale for expensive procedures, and funding only treatments shown to be effective. To accomplish these objectives, he says, the Swedish model relies heavily on government authority and nonprofit institutions -- certainly far more than the Affordable Care Act does.