What to include in a bundle of health care

Virginia Postrel, now a writer from The Atlantic Monthly, made a lasting impression in one of her articles from a prior publication. At a time when inflationary pressures in healthcare are running at 3 times the national inflation rate, and demand continues to grow, it is only too apparent that there are no easy fixes to any healthcare system. How we define health care is imperative to finding the solution.

Health care isn't a single good, nor, like food, is it easily defined in terms of a minimum to sustain life. Studying other countries' supposedly universal systems only demonstrates how fraught the concept of "health care" is: one bundle of services in British Columbia and a less-generous one in Nova Scotia, one in England and another in Scotland, one in New Zealand before the election and another afterwards. Arguably the U.S. already has universal care, in the sense that everyone can get some care-if only from an emergency room-for some things, and that citizens (a critical word in this context) without money are covered by Medicaid. The real issue is how you define "health care." What gets included is a matter not only of medicine and economics but of culture and politics.