July 9, 2010 3:58PM # Does MedPAC Think Markets Produce Zero Public Goods? By [Michael F. Cannon](https://www.cato.org/people/michael-f-cannon) --- SHARE I just came across this doozy in [a 2009 report](http://www.medpac.gov/documents/Mar09_EntireReport.pdf) by [MedPAC](http://www.medpac.gov), the government agency that advises Congress on how to adjust Medicare’s price and exchange controls: > In broad terms, we must … invest in better information on the effectiveness of treatment options so it might guide the decisions of patients, health care providers, and public and private insurers. Our nation spends over $2 trillion on health care, yet we know far too little about the comparative effectiveness of alternative treatments. **Such information is a public good, which has not—and will not—be \[sic\] spontaneously produced by the private market.** Except: the private market *has* spontaneously produced comparative-effectiveness information, as I documented in [this study](https://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa632.pdf) released one month prior to the MedPAC report. I also explain why the argument for government provision of [public goods](http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/PublicGoods.html) is shaky. Ironically, MedPAC disables the “copy” function in the reports it posts online, so I had to type out the above excerpt by hand. Why is that ironic? It’s an example of the sort of innovation that enables markets to overcome the public-good problem. (But since my tax dollars paid for that report, it seems to be an innovation that maybe MedPAC could abandon.) ##### Related Tags [Government and Politics](https://www.cato.org/government-politics), [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/).