September 22, 2009 11:50AM # Cutting Health Care Costs By [David Boaz](https://www.cato.org/people/david-boaz) --- SHARE Ezra Klein, the young Washington Post blogger who writes a lot about health care, contributed [an article](http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/blogs/beltway-confidential/Katrina-vanden-Heuvels-unhinged-depiction-of-the-912-march-60045837.html) to the paper’s Sunday Business section in which he made this compelling point along the way: > The surest way to cut health-care spending would be to make people shoulder more of the burden directly, as opposed to hiding it in taxes and lost wages. Bingo! Exactly! So why does Klein want government to get more involved, to wrap our health care in a web of mandates and subsidies and regulations and gatekeepers and monitors? When, as he says, making the cost of health care clear and direct would be “the surest way to cut health-care spending”? Michael Cannon’s [proposal](https://www.cato.org/pubs/tbb/tbb-0505-23.pdf) for [“Large HSAs”](https://www.cato.org/2008/03/17/large-health-savings-accounts-unveiled/) would move us in the right direction. It would allow workers to receive the full amount that they and their employer spend on their health benefits as a tax-free cash contribution to the worker’s health savings account. That would give consumers control over their health care dollars, giving them an incentive to shop around, ask questions, and generally hold down costs as consumers do in normal competitive businesses. You can’t say it enough: > The surest way to cut health-care spending would be to make people shoulder more of the burden directly, as opposed to hiding it in taxes and lost wages. Congress should stop moving in the other direction. ##### Related Tags [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care) [![Creative Commons License](/build/cato_2020/images/creative-commons.svg)](http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/) This work is licensed under a [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/).