Brief Postcript: UCSF Mini Med School Discussion

Last week I blogged about the first session of the UCSF mini-medical school on health policy, in which Dr. Laura Schmidt argued that more progressive economic policies would improve health care.

This weekend I caught up with (some) of the backlog of New Yorker articles I've accumulated over the past month or so.  And thus I read Ryan Lizza's profile of Peter Orszag, President Obama's budget director. 

Lizza details Orszag's commitment to realigning incentives within the health care industry, to encourage physicians to spend more time on treatments that work and less time on treatments that don't. This seems obvious, but is much easier said than done and also opens the Obama administration to predictable criticism that it is seeking to interfere with the market.

Let that debate rage elsewhere.  Now I wish to focus on the parallels between Orszag and Schmidt's arguments.  Orszag's sense of economic policy is narrower than Dr. Schmidt's.  He wants to re-engineer the current system at a few points, she wants to change US tax policy to be more progressive.  But both approaches assume that improving health outcomes involves more than guaranteeing health insurance; that's a worthy but not sufficient goal.