We do know how to control health cost inflation

David Brooks's column in The New York Times is a suggested opening for his Wednesday night debate. It includes this "brutal truth" about Medicare costs: "Nobody knows how to reduce health-care inflation." It would be a pretty brutal truth except for the fact it's not really true at all: We have a lot of examples to look at where governments have successfully held down the rate of healthcare cost inflation. Most of them do that through some version of price controls, where the government sets the rates that doctors can charge for various services.