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Health Care Metrics
...First of all, I think Ezra overstates the prevalence of emergency care. Not every medical situation is a dire one; in most cases, in fact, you're not about to die if care isn't given as soon as possible. Usually, those seeking care do have some time—even if only a few days or weeks—to make informed choices of their own. But because they're so insulated from costs due to the current insurance regime, they have no incentive to do so.

Anyway, I think his response fails to address my original point, which was that, no matter what, some entity needs to record and make available various health care metrics in order to make decisions about care. But there's no guarantee—and in fact, I'd argue that there's actually less of a guarantee—that the government is or will be equipped or willing to reliably do so.

Let's think about this for a minute. He argues first that individuals are doomed to lack the sort of information necessary to make choices about their health care. And then he argues that the government needs to spend "a lot of money" on effectiveness research. Presumably, if the consumer is unable to make determinations for him or herself, that means the government will be doing so instead. So although he pays some lip service to giving individuals the "maximum possible information and price transparency," what Ezra essentially wants to do is leave health care decisions in the hands of bureaucrat-experts (presumably, in a largely or fully public system, the ratings and determinations of the government body are followed by the health providers). And as I pointed out before, the government isn't exactly a bastion of accuracy and honesty when it comes to self-assessment. ...