That’s the question Robin Hanson poses in the most recent issue of Cato Unbound.  His answer?  We’d probably be better off:

We could cut U.S. medical spending in half without substantial net health costs. This would give us the equivalent of an 8% pay raise.

Hanson entertains responses to his essay by distinguished health economists David Cutler, Dana Goldman, and Alan Garber – who are not as dismissive of Hanson’s thesis as you might expect.

Hanson was my health economics professor.  Only later did I learn he does not have a degree in economics.  (Insert your own credibility-shattering joke mcannon [at] cato.org (here)

.)  As he explains in his essay and elsewhere, “Most students in my eight years of teaching health economics have simply not believed me, even after a semester of reviewing the evidence.”

I was familiar with much of the evidence presented, and so I found Hanson’s argument plausible.  But I am not so familiar with the evidence to be confident that I could find the holes in Hanson’s argument.  So I did what any student would do: I put my professor on the hot seat with A-list economists from Harvard, Stanford, and Rand.

So far, the discussion has been everything I hoped.  But it hasn’t yet zeroed in on the heart of the contributors’ disagreement.  I hope they will all stay engaged.