In 1942, Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Economic Stabilization Act, which exempted health insurance from its mandated wage controls: the original sin of America’s flawed health-care system. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A new study in Health Affairs is attracting attention for its depiction of how powerful hospitals are extracting “steep payment increases” from insurers. But what the study really tells us is how much the exceptional cost of American health insurance is caused by our system’s original sin: the fact that, due to a quirk in the federal tax code, most of us don’t buy insurance for ourselves, but instead have it bought on our behalf by our employers.