Don’t miss this KevinMD.com/David Gratzer, M.D. post on how – despite the miracles of modern medicine — the poor incentives of the fractured U.S. health care finance system encourage people not to change unhealthy habits:

But if medicine has never been so advanced, the actual health of Americans is far less robust. The Era of Modern Medicine has given way to the Age of Preventable Illness. Americans have embraced a culture of extremes: too much alcohol, tobacco, drugs, and food, and not enough exercise and restraint. American leads the way in medical innovation, winning more Nobel Prizes in Medicine than all other countries combined. We also lead the world in obesity, and have the poor life expectancy statistics to show for it. [ .  .  .]

ObamaCare seeks to divorce people from the financial consequences of their health decisions — regulating insurance to treat people equally regardless of age or illness (community rating), offering many no-deductible services, mandating the coverage of other services, and sweetening the deal with heavy subsidies.

Let’s be clear: a patient with Schizophrenia shouldn’t be punished because his father and grandfather had the disease. But many illnesses are preventable. Rather than encourage health, ObamaCare seeks to socialize the costs of bad health.

As noted earlier here, perhaps the wisest investment in health care finance that we could make at this stage is simply better education?