July 26, 2026 | Jared Bernstein
Jared Bernstein on Substack: What Type of Health Care Plan Would You Craft If You Listened to Americans Struggling to Pay for Health Care?
“I'm pretty sure it would look a lot like this one.”
Jared Bernstein took on the latest healthcare proposal from the Kitchen Table Project, noting:
“Ask people about their affordability constraints and you’ll find that healthcare is right up there with housing. No question, health coverage is a very big problem for the 8% (28 million) non-elderly Americans who are uninsured, but paying for health care is also a daunting challenge for the rest of us. Out-of-pocket (OOP) costs, monthly premiums, prescriptions, high deductibles, co-pays—ask people with health coverage about these costs and you’ll hear a lot of discontent.
“How do I know that? Because the folks from the Kitchen Table Project (KTP) asked regular folks about healthcare affordability and what they heard boils down to “out-of-pocket costs are crushing us. They’re crazy high, they’re impossible to make sense out of, and they hit you the hardest when you or someone in your family is sick.”
“If you want to see for yourself, watch their video. If, like me, you recently interacted with the system, what you see will strongly resonate. Literally last week, I went to the pharmacy for a prescription that was impossibly expensive. When I said I won’t pay that cost, the pharmacist hit some buttons and the cost fell by a third (though even that was still prohibitive).
“This, my friends, is no market. It’s a huge, non-transparent mess of an inelastically demanded—i.e., essential—services fraught with deep market failures, ones economists have known about since Arrow’s pathbreaking work in the 1960s! As health economist Neale Mahoney (who’s on the KPT team) recently put it, “Economists know that when consumers are fully informed, information is symmetric, and firms face sufficient competition, market prices are efficient…healthcare markets don’t meet these conditions.”