lets join the rest of the industrialized world

Let's Try a Dose. We're Bound to Feel Better.

But the critics have it backward. The best American medical care is indeed extremely good, but much of our system falls short -- especially when you consider how costly it is, how heavy a burden it places on employers and families, and how many it excludes. And far from being a threat, getting the government more involved in health care would actually reduce costs, improve quality and bolster the U.S. economy -- which helps explain why public insurance is the secret weapon in both of the leading Democratic candidates' plans. If socialized medicine means doing what our public-insurance programs and other nations' health systems do to control costs, expand coverage and improve the quality of care, it's high time for a little socialization.

To see the advantages of public insurance, just look at the program that once prompted the fiercest charges of socialized medicine, Medicare. Since the introduction of cost controls in the 1980s, Medicare's expenditures have grown at a substantially slower rate than spending on private insurance, according to a recent analysis by the health-care experts Cristina Boccuti and Marilyn Moon. And despite Medicare's comparative frugality, the program's beneficiaries express greater happiness with their coverage than do privately insured patients in surveys of consumer satisfaction.

Other industrialized nations have also seen the benefits of public insurance. Around the same time that Medicare cracked down on payments, most rich nations began more actively negotiating with doctors and hospitals to keep prices from rising through the roof. Lo and behold, medical inflation in most of the industrialized world has slowed dramatically, as the health policy specialist Chapin White has shown. But without such coordinated restraint, U.S. spending on health care has continued to rise rapidly -- a far cry from the 1970s, when our health-care spending per person was comparable to that of other rich nations and growing at about the same rate.