Tempering anti-physician rhetoric with a dose of reality

Ezra Klein: “There’s more than just guild greed at work. Methods of rationing, like capitation, are a hard sell to voters who want to believe they’ll get not only every treatment they could plausibly benefit from, but quite a few they couldn’t plausibly benefit from. In general, patients have a Samuel Gompers attitude towards medical treatment: They want more. Doctors don’t make much money when they prescribe unnecessary antibiotics for colds. They do it because patients want antibiotics — they feel better knowing something has been done.”