The latest in a series of posts by Uwe Reinhardt.

Surely there is something absurd when a nation pays a primary care physician poorly relative to other specialists and then wrings its hands over a shortage of primary care physicians.

But this sentence does not convey the flavor of the post. Reinhardt is a true believer in technocratic pricing, or what I would call socialist calculation. He regards the mistakes that this process produces as anomalies that can be corrected.

His economic analysis of Medicare pricing shows great knowledge of the trees but a failure to grasp the forest. By the forest, I mean the entire socialist calculation debate.