Our main problem in health policy is overemphasis on medicine (2007)

Our main problem in health policy is overemphasis on medicine (2007)
cato-unbound.org

Sigh

Older articles and historical material are always welcome on HN, if they're interesting. Often they're more interesting than the latest $thing about $current-hot-topic.

As for which credentials professors do or don't have, that seems irrelevant to whether or not the article can be the basis for a substantive, interesting discussion, which is what we care about here.

The main reason to consider this article offtopic for HN would be that it's on a classic flamewar topic. However, those aren't automatically bad. It depends, again, whether the article contains enough interesting information be different (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), and can sustain an interesting discussion. After skimming it a bit, I think it probably clears that bar.

I've changed the title from the original, though (because it's provocative and therefore flamebaity) to a representative sentence from the article body, which says what the article is about.

Of course it's still up to HN users to focus on the interesting parts and discuss them thoughtfully, rather than use it as a diving board to spring into pits of hellfire from.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

This essay set may superficially appear to be another repetitive salvo in the interminable US healthcare political conflict, but I recommend reading a bit deeper. I think the perspective these essays offer (that, at the margin, medical spending doesn't affect people's wellspan much, at least not in the US) is both quite important and underrepresented in most discussions of healthcare.