Stanford University Expert Co-authors The Economists’ Guide To Rehabilitating U.S. Health Care

That’s the recommendation from economists Liran Einav of Stanford and Amy Finkelstein of MIT for how to fix the $4 trillion apparatus that is U.S. health care – and it’s detailed in their new book, We’ve Got You Covered: Rebooting American Health Care (Portfolio, 2023). Having researched the patchwork of U.S. health care policies for nearly 20 years, Einav and Finkelstein declare it’s time to stop putting Band-Aids on a system they diagnose as “incoherent, uncoordinated, inefficient, and unplanned.” Their two-part solution: free, automatic, and basic health care for every American together with the option to buy supplemental insurance. If this sounds like universal coverage, it is. But as Einav and Finkelstein explain, this isn’t about politics: The U.S. has unofficially enacted universal coverage already – it’s just botched the implementation of it.

The book marks the second from Einav and Finkelstein and comes less than a year after their first, Risky Business: Why Insurance Markets Fail and What to Do About It, was released (written with Ray Fisman of Boston University and named to two separate Financial Times lists of the best books to read).