Is the medical system actually working?

I frequently write about breakthroughs in medicine and suggest that innovation, not government-run healthcare, is the answer.

There now seems to be some evidence that this is true.

New data show that health spending over the past several years has been normalizing toward the rate of general inflation, rather than growing higher and higher, as had been the case almost continuously since the 1970s, J.D. Kleinke writes in The Wall Street Journal.

This moderation in the growth rate of spending predates the national recession. And it puts the lie to the claim that we need government to put the brakes on an "out-of-control" health-care system. The moderation has been driven by cumulative improvements in medical care and by insurers, and by marketplace disciplines on the demand for medical care. Consumers are finally getting more involved in managing and paying for their own care.

Contrary to the perennial doomsaying, the health-care system is—almost in spite of itself—getting better, Kleinke says.

A generation of breakthrough drugs for chronic disease, mental illness, HIV and cancer were developed in the 1980s and '90s at great cost. Dozens of these drugs—like Zocor for heart disease or Zyprexa for schizophrenia—are now widely available, many in generic form. There are now countless electronic ways of telling patients about them. And health insurers are driven by their own evolving market disciplines to make sure patients start taking them and keep taking them in the cheapest available versions. 

Combine all these new medicines, information channels and business compulsions with the slow, steady transfer of economic responsibility for health care—from corporate and government bureaucrats to consumers and their families—and suddenly health-care starts to look almost like an actual market.

Just in time for the whole thing to get swallowed up by Washington.