We received help with this book from many sources. First and foremost, we would like to thank Matthew Spitzer, of the Pritzker School of Law at Northwestern University and the Searle Center on Law, Regulation, and Economic Growth, for sponsoring a conference on our first draft of this manuscript. We are also grateful to Derek Gundersen for handling the conference arrangements, and to the individuals who participated in the program and provided helpful comments and advice: Bernie Black, Michael F. Cannon, John R. Graham, David Johnson, Ram Krishnamoorthi, David Meltzer, Michael Millenson, Jean Mitchell, Harold Pollack, Rita Redberg, Greg Ruhnke, and Kathy Zeiler.
Our editors at the Cato Institute—Robert Garber, Jason Kuznicki, Eleanor O’Connor, Peter Van Doren, and especially Michael Cannon—who reviewed the draft manuscript helped us enormously too. They provided extensive comments on every chapter that challenged us to deepen our analyses, sharpen our focus, clean up the language, and consider new ideas. We are grateful for their help, and we’re happy to say that the book is much better because of them.
Michael Cannon also gave us the opportunity to present some of our ideas at a conference of state libertarian think tanks sponsored by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. We are grateful for the many helpful comments we received from the policy analysts who attended that program.
Brigitte Silver, then a young attorney fresh out of the University of Virginia Law School, was in on the ground floor of this book, which initially focused on health care fraud. Fortunately, the study of that dismal subject did not render her as cynical as it has us. We thank her for her efforts and hope she retains her optimism for many years to come.
Over several years, we have presented draft chapters of the book to students in seminars on health law and policy, some of whom went on to develop the ideas those drafts contained in greater detail than we had. We benefited from their thoughts and their work. We also published ideas from the book as short columns on The Health Care Blog. We wish to thank John Irvine and Jonathan Halvorson for giving us that opportunity. We placed op-eds in other publications as well and thank Chris Roberts, who handles public relations at the University of Texas School of Law, for editing them and finding homes for them.
We are, of course, also grateful to the Georgetown Law Center, the University of Illinois College of Law, and the School of Law at the University of Texas at Austin for supporting our research over many years. The University of Texas School of Law in particular helped us by supporting our research assistants—Tim Elliott, Kevin Stewart, and Bryan Zubay—all of whom did terrific work. We cannot thank them enough. The Cato Institute provided research assistance too. Tom Capone and Michael Schemenaur helped us get the citations right, caught several math mistakes, and suggested important textual improvements.
Last, our wives, children, relatives, friends, and colleagues helped us develop our thinking too. The health care system touches everyone, and everyone has thoughts on how well it works and how it might be improved. Because health care was an enormous issue in the 2016 election, we often seemed to be involved in conversations about the subject nonstop. Whenever we mentioned that we were writing a book on the health care payment system, people would ask about our views and want to know how we would fix things. They’d often disagree, but they also supported our efforts to think hard about problems, often by sending us media reports of new developments or studies of which we were unaware. We’re grateful for their encouragement, assistance, and patience.