Senator Obama proposes "The Quality Cure"

Potential voters in November are starting to pay more attention to what the leading presidential candidates have to say about how to reform our health care system. In a new article from the New York Times magazine, David Cutler responds to the principles underlying Senator Barack Obama's proposals. Cutler basically says that the US should focus on improving the quality of care rather than on reducing our consumption of it. Rather than pay less, they want to pay more wisely, and encourage health-care providers to do more of what they should and less of what is wasteful by building proper incentives into the system. Chief among these ideas is to support the personal medical home, which we have been writing about in this blog, and to continue the role of our private health care insurers, but with oversight and regulation that promotes these aims. In my opinion, this is the right direction, and voters have a clear choice in November.