Ideal Health Policy: First Do No Harm

Our health care system is a complex system. As I explained in Priceless, there is no known, reliable model of how it works. Whatever policy changes we make, there are certain to be unintended consequences and they may make matters worse than when we started. So how should we approach health policy? In an article in the Journal of Legal Medicine, I argued that before we try to solve social problems in health care we should first make sure that government is not the cause of the very problems we are trying to solve. How do we do that? By identifying the major ways in which government policies create harmful, perverse incentives and then replacing them with neutral (do no harm) policies. Once we have removed the perverse incentives government has created, we will be in a position to see if there are any remaining problems that need to be solved.