One of the more interesting aspects of the health care legislation that is about to be signed into law is the role of economics. The allocation of relatively scarce resources is the primary core of economics. To a very large extent, many components in the new law seek to suspend or obviate the natural laws that govern economics by government fiat. History is replete with examples of this being attempted but almost none where it has worked. Markets tend to work and interfering (as we sometimes want to do) with their functions can often lead to nasty unintended consequences.
Our STAT piece this week concerns the 2 stages of life- the savings stage and the consumption stage. There are many things we can't control but one that we can is how much we save for future consumption. In our practice we see many issues ahead because of insufficient savings . A good piece was in
Business Week on this recently. The natural laws of economics won't be obviated here either.
