RestoringQualityHealthCare Format: TradePaperback

The Affordable Care Act (ACA) granted the federal government unprecedented regulatory authority over health insurance and the health care industry. Those changes ignore the fundamental problems with the existing system: the incentives that have caused runaway costs and excluded millions of Americans from accessing the world’s best medical care. Many former ACA supporters now push for an even more extreme takeover of the US system: overt single-payer health care, or “Medicare for All.” In Restoring Quality Health Care, Dr. Scott W. Atlas offers a fundamentally different approach to improving America’s health care system. Instead of framing the debate with the traditional trade-offs—fewer benefits versus higher taxes—his plan is modeled around a new paradigm: restoring the appropriate market-based incentives to increase the quality of health care and reduce its costs. He proposes a six-point reform plan for US health care centering on lower-cost catastrophic coverage and universal, significantly expanded health savings accounts (HSAs). The plan transforms the US health care system and enhances innovation by instilling market-based competition and empowering consumers through incentives and strategic deregulation. Most important, the health care reforms in this plan reflect the key principles held by Americans concerning what they value and expect from health care in terms of access, choice, and quality.

Scott W. Atlas, MD, is the Robert Wesson Senior Fellow in Scientific Philosophy and Public Policy at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution and a member of Hoover’s Working Group on Health Care Policy.