Health care

The health care heading carries one essay, and it approaches the subject sideways: a television series about a chemistry teacher who manufactures methamphetamine is used to argue about medical costs, insurance and the culture of the American West Coast. The column did this often — taking a piece of popular culture as the evidence that an economic argument has reached ordinary conversation.

Health costs as such are not a standing section of the portal. What the portal does carry, in Society and policy and regulation, is the measurement side of the same questions: how a threshold is drawn, how an index is computed, and what a published statistic is allowed to claim. The essay below keeps the address, the date and the byline the column gave it, and is reproduced without rewriting.

Saying that health costs are not a standing section is a statement about the portal’s limits rather than about the subject’s importance. A section is opened here only when there is a published series or document to read on a schedule, and the newsroom has not opened one for medical pricing. Until it does, the honest course is to leave the archive essay where its author filed it and point readers at the measurement work that does exist.