Ezra Klein is a liberal blogger who has made a name for himself as a sort of health care "policy wonk".In my own biased opinion, he has tended to focus almost exclusively on the evils of the insurance industry in creating our current rotten system. But yesterday, for the first time that I know of, he posted some international health costs data.As he says:

On Friday, I sat down with Kaiser Permanente CEO George Halvorson to talk about health-care reform. The conversation was long and ranging and will take a while to transcribe. But before we really got into the weeds, Halvorson handed me an astonishing packet of charts. The material was put together by the International Federation of Health Plans, which is pretty much what it sounds like: an association of insurance plans in different countries. But it showed something I've never seen before, at least not at this level of detail: prices...The packet's 36 pages are mostly graphs showing the average prices paid in different countries for different procedures, diagnostics and drugs. There is a thudding consistency to the pages: a series of crude bars, with the block representing the prices paid by American health-insurance plans looming over the others like a New York skyscraper that got lost in downtown Des Moines.

I have several observations about this. First, these ratios are quite accurate from my own experience in the industry. Second, a common criticism of the health care reform is that if costs are not contained in some way by the reform itself, the system will not work in the long run on the financing side. Third, I will point out that the slide deck (and you should look at the whole deck here [PDF]) separatesMedicare ratesfrom commercial rates. Note that 1) Medicare rates themselves are higher than for the other countries 2)commercial rates are higher thanMedicare rates and 3) commercial rates are higher than the 5 percent bumpto Medicare that the public option people propose as the reimbursement rate for the public option.Another blog below asks us if the health care reform will work. My short answer is: no. To see why, Iencourage you to read all of the comments to Mr. Klein's blog. When you cut through all of the snark you will find that many people have very very good points to make but that no one is really talking to anyone else. Out of this chaos shall come --- chaos. Call me an evilcapitalist businessman, but if health reform were a businessproblem I was called upon to solve, I would approach it entirelydifferently. What I see here is that we have hardly left the brain storming sessions.