Opinion: Defying gravity

For over a century, we've regarded health care as qualitatively different from other goods and services – an economic Oz, where the normal rules of nature don't apply. In doing so, we waste resources, keep prices artificially high and delay life-saving and life-improving technologies. But this will soon pass In December, Dr. Naoki Ikegami told The New York Times: "[T]he U.S. health care system … defies the laws of economics, and of gravity. Once the price is high, it just stays there." Over a century earlier, three-time presidential nominee William Jennings Bryan proclaimed the primacy of miracles over science.