While Congress slept… - overhaul of Medicare physician payment program

National Review, July 9, 1990 by Susan Mandel

That's bad enough, but in this case the distortion of the price system went one step further: toward incomes. As the nurses were quick to realize, the RVS moved us closer toward setting up comparable-worth mechanisms that would, for example, require that secretaries and truck drivers be paid the same; for once you take prices out of the market and give them to the government, almost anything can happen. And you can bet that there will be another Harvard economist to come up with the right theory to justify it.

Miss Mandel is NR's congressional reporter.