In a recent article, Duke University law professors and health-care policy researchers Clark C. Havighurst and Barak D. Richman argue that ordinary Americans with health coverage pay substantially higher premiums to support a vast enterprise that primarily benefits health-care industry interests and other higher-income consumers and taxpayers. They find “serious and systematic unfairness in the American way of financing, regulating, and dispensing health care.” Havighurst and Richman urge closer examination of the health-policy factors behind who pays and who benefits in our health-care system.

Two specialists in the financing, regulation, and delivery of health care in the United States, economist Alain C. Enthoven of Stanford University--who is known as the godfather of managed competition--and law and medicine professor David A. Hyman of the University of Illinois College of Law, will assess the comparative efficiency and effectiveness of the authors’ critique that the U.S. health-care system operates more like a robber baron than like Robin Hood. AEI’s Thomas P. Miller will moderate.