As I’ve noted many times, EconLog’s Arnold Kling is doing some of the best writing and thinking about health care and health care finance issues in the U.S. right now. In his latest TCS op-ed, Kling describes the care received recently by his elderly father (who sounds as if he should have been a patient of my late father) and observes:

Medicare is wonderful for relieving the elderly from the burden of worrying about health care expenses. By the same token, it is wonderful for relieving doctors of the burden of worrying about the elderly as customers. You get paid for understanding the billing system, not for understanding your patients.

Read the entire op-ed. An update post is here.