The NYT is so dogmatically protectionist in some areas that it will not even allow discussion of free trade on its pages. The protectionist doctrine is perhaps nowhere deeper than in the treatment of health care. The United States has a hugely inefficient health care system. We pay more than twice as much per person as the average for other wealthy countries yet we rank near the bottom in most measures of health outcomes. Reform is blocked by the power of the insurance and pharmaceutical industry, as well as the doctors' lobbies. The obvious solution would be to make it easier for people in the United States to take advantage of the more efficient health care systems elsewhere in the world. But the NYT never even has allowed this idea to be discussed in its pages. Instead, we get diatribes from protectionists like Tyler Cowen, who warns that we will be forced to pay 60-80 percent of income in taxes by the end of the century if we don't change the current structure of Medicare. (You get these numbers by assuming that health care costs continue to grow much faster than income, leading to large budget deficits, and that Congress lets the deficits get ever larger [never raising taxes or cutting spending] so that by the end of the century the country has an incredible debt and interest burden. It's not a serious projection, but it's good for scaring people.) The U.S. health care system is seriously broken. If the political system is too corrupt to fix it, then people in the United States should be allowed to take advantage of health care systems that work. It should be possible to talk about trade in health care services in a serious newspaper.
--Dean Baker
