Megan McArdle on health care costs

There are some really good points here.

Practically, we have to pay healthcare workers a lot because we have to pay everyone a lot; in a rich country, wages for healthcare workers are high. And measuring healthcare productivity is really insanely difficult, which makes it very hard to figure out what's worth spending money on. As long as Americans don't want to sacrifice access to procedures--and they don't--there's just not much room for decreasing costs.

[. . .]

That doesn't bother me that much. The mindless trend extrapolation about how much we'll spend on health care in the future elides the point that we'll be much richer in the future; why shouldn't we spend all that extra income on healthcare?[. . .] When I look around at our incredibly bountiful economy, I don't see any obvious lack that we're creating by spending ever more of our income on leading longer, healthier lives.