The simplest thing to do is pick out the best healthcare system in the world, and then replicate it exactly. So bring in the top officials from Singapore, put them on an independent commission to redesign the healthcare system, and force Congress to pass exactly the plan they come up with.

Read more about Singapore's healthcare system here: http://econlog.econlib.org/archives/2008/01/singapores_heal.... http://www.american.com/archive/2008/may-june-magazine-conte...

But coming back to Earth, such a plan could never happen. If you approach the problem from the perspective of a hypothetical policy advisor, there is very little that is both a) politically possible and b) would actually improve the system. Raising the caps on medical school enrollment is an obvious fix that would reduce costs without costing taxpayers anything, but the doctors will try their hardest to block it. A mandate to buy insurance makes sense in theory, but in practice the required level of healthcare to buy gets set way, way, too high, and so a mandate ends up being a huge transfer from citizens to the healthcare industry. There are dozens of other examples. Our system is f*ed up for a reason, and until the political system is reformed, policy reform is impossible.

In reality, healthcare spending will continue to rise until it simply cannot rise further. The spending will be distributed according to political power.