As the year draws to a close, I want to finish by passing along my personal list of the most interesting essays on political issues from 2009. My selections are partly inspired by David Brooks' excellent Sidney Awards. Part one of my selections is here. Today I want to look at a few of the social issues that we were talking about this year—health care, drug policy, the environment, and race relations.

In his influential essay "The Cost Conundrum" (The New Yorker, June 1), Atul Gawande shows that the quality of our health care is not particularly related to how much we pay for it. Instead, he argues, health care costs rise where treatment guidelines are not well-established and doctors have an financial incentive to recommend more expensive care.

Providing health care is like building a house. The task requires experts, expensive equipment and materials, and a huge amount of coördination. Imagine that, instead of paying a contractor to pull a team together and keep them on track, you paid an electrician for every outlet he recommends, a plumber for every faucet, and a carpenter for every cabinet. Would you be surprised if you got a house with a thousand outlets, faucets, and cabinets, at three times the cost you expected, and the whole thing fell apart a couple of years later?

In "How American Health Care Killed My Father" (The Atlantic, September), David Goldhill tries to understand, after the death of his father from infections contracted in the hospital, why we tolerate a system that allows so many preventable deaths. Rather than being deliberately, rationally designed, our system has developed in response to all manner of perverse incentives. Part of the problem, he argues, is that we use insurance to pay for all of our health-care expenses, which is inefficient and distorts the incentives of health-care providers.

Health insurance is the primary payment mechanism not just for expenses that are unexpected and large, but for nearly all health-care expenses. We’ve become so used to health insurance that we don’t realize how absurd that is. We can’t imagine paying for gas with our auto-insurance policy, or for our electric bills with our homeowners insurance, but we all assume that our regular checkups and dental cleanings will be covered at least partially by insurance. Most pregnancies are planned, and deliveries are predictable many months in advance, yet they’re financed the same way we finance fixing a car after a wreck—through an insurance claim.

In "It's Time to Legalize Drugs," (The Washington Post, August 17), Peter Moskos and Stanford "Neill" Franklin—both former police officers—write that "drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals." Instead, they argue that it would be better to regulate recreational drugs the way we do alcohol and prescription medications than continue an expensive and violent war on drugs, which has done little to stop drug abuse.

Cities and states license beer and tobacco sellers to control where, when and to whom drugs are sold. Ending Prohibition saved lives because it took gangsters out of the game. Regulated alcohol doesn't work perfectly, but it works well enough. Prescription drugs are regulated, and while there is a huge problem with abuse, at least a system of distribution involving doctors and pharmacists works without violence and high-volume incarceration. Regulating drugs would work similarly: not a cure-all, but a vast improvement on the status quo.

In "Saving Mexico" (The Wall Street Journal, December 26), David Luhnow argues that the only way to combat the drug cartels that are destroying Mexico is to legalize marijuana. By decriminalizing the cartels' steadiest, highest-margin product, we can move production of the drug to legal farms in California and kill the drug trade by making it unprofitable.

Growing numbers of Mexican and U.S. officials say—at least privately—that the biggest step in hurting the business operations of Mexican cartels would be simply to legalize their main product: marijuana. Long the world's most popular illegal drug, marijuana accounts for more than half the revenues of Mexican cartels.

In "The Ass's Dilemma: Can Man Engineer the Climate?" (The Virginia Quarterly Review, Spring), Pat Joseph looks at the possibility that the warming effects of greenhouse gases could be counterbalanced with some form of geo-engineering, like releasing sulfates into the stratosphere to reflect some of the sun's energy. Although such schemes are theoretically possible, many climate scientists shy away from geo-engineering, arguing that it would be much simpler and less risky to simply reduce our carbon emissions. But if that turns out not to be politically feasible, we may have start contemplating more drastic fixes.