November 21, 2011
The NYT is generally a strong supporter of more open trade. However, for some reason its editorial on constraining costs in Medicare never mentioned an increased role for trade. This is peculiar since the fact that the health care system in the United States is so much more costly than health care systems elsewhere in the world (we pay more than twice as much per person for our care as people in other wealthy countries) means that there are large opportunities of gains from trade.
People who prefer freer trade to protectionism should be looking in this direction. The potential gains are several orders of magnitude larger than the potential gains from various trade deals over the last two decades.
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