Are We Still Talking About This?

Either Matt Yglesias is rehashing points that don't need to be rehashed, or the "national conversation" part of health care reform failed miserably:

After all, it seems to me that one of the big drivers of lack of productivity in the health care sector is the paucity of innovations that take the form of “not quite as good, but way cheaper.”

[...] If you say to yourself “this table’s 90 percent as good as the other one and only half the price, so now I can go take a fun vacation” you’ll feel like you made a savvy life choice. But if you say to your wife “this cancer treatment’s 90 percent as good as the other one and only half the price, so now I can go take a fun vacation” you’re going to be in a world of pain. Because in a lot of ways health care is more about the care than about the health. People don’t want a “good deal” the way they do on household appliances. So by and large we don’t get a good deal.

I've seen this point made lots and lots of times before, especially by Yglesias. It's an excellent point, but I submit that it should now be a point of departure and not a point in itself. Does Yglesias support 90%, low-cost options? Well, yeah. But it's not sufficient to raise the question provocatively anymore. And if it is, that sufficiency is itself a sign of our collective failure to advance the discussion.