A destination

Okay, so it would be neat to solve the health care problem.  What does that mean?  My first thought about 2.5 years ago was this: twice the quality of care for half of the price.  My second thought, which came today, about 2.5 years later, was this: the health care problem is solved if there is a system in place whereby the ratio between the quality of care and the cost of care increases by some percentage each year indefinitely.

Then I realized that this can be easily gamed: you can keep the ratio of marginal benefits to marginal costs high by restricting care to only the care that is most beneficial.  That isn’t what we want to do.  So I would qualify my second thought this way: the health care problem is solved if there is a system in place whereby the ratio between the quality of care and the cost of care increases by some percentage each year indefinitely, subject to the constraint that there be no artificial constraints on the supply of health care.  Now it sounds a bit complicated.  Regardless of the definition, the concept is clear: solving the health care problem means that from now until an indefinite point in the future health care will get better and costs will go down.  More fundamentally, perhaps we can see health get better and costs go down.