Prior to the government's intrusion into medical arena, health care was regarded as a product like any other, subject to free market forces like food, clothing, or haircuts. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Doctors even made house calls! Then, almost all Americans could afford basic health care services, while those few who couldn't were able to depend on generous private charity.
If this freedom been allowed to continue, our rising productivity and standard of living would have allowed us to buy improved health care, just as, today, we buy better and greater varieties of food, clothing, and technology than our parents and grandparents did. As with food, clothing, technology, car insurance, or any other important product or service, there would be no crisis of affordability.
But by the time Medicare and Medicaid were enacted in 1965, health care began to be viewed, not as a product for which each individual is personally responsible for, but as a right, and entitlement, or as an unearned benefit to be provided at someone elses expense.
Today, what we have is not a system based on American individualism and personal responsibility, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the responsibility of paying for his or her own health care by forcefully extracting its costs from his or her neighbors. This is evil.
Almost half of all healthcare spending in America is already in the form of government spending. It's no coincidence that affordability and access have declined in direct proportion to the amount of government involvement.
Right on the money.
ReplyDeletePersonal freedom & individual responsibility equate to too much pressure to most people. "I can't deal".....
BS
Hey: You will not take my earned income and give it to someone who's clueless and useless. That ain't America.
This is libertarian propaganda. Do pregnant women have a right to health care? Do infants and children have a right to health care? Denying health care could be a death sentence. What happened to "right to life"?
ReplyDeleteGB
I wouldn't put too much stock in the words of the Declaration of independence.
ReplyDeleteThomas Jefferson , who came up with the idea...
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
...also owned over 600 slaves during his lifetime.
None of them were at liberty or had the right to pursue happiness.
Jefferson saw no contradiction. In fact, the Declaration of Independence was not the "bible' that we all make it out to be.
It was merely a document, wrote rather hastily, and revised without Jefferson's consent, that was meant to let King George know what the colonist were about to break away from England.
Keep in mind that the Declaration of Independence wasn't meant to apply to All Americans at all times. It was a declaration by the colonists of divorce from England. It did not, for example, apply to all men for all time...especially slaves
Hrmm -- do you believe we have a "right" to be saved by the fire department if our house is burning down, or to be saved by National Guard troops if our town is flooded, or to be rushed to the hospital if you're hit by a car? Do we have a right to be protected from theft? How can you have a "free market" if people are being robbed, or lying sick and dying in the middle of it?
ReplyDeleteAs a Libertarian who has done a lot of thinking about this issue, free trade solutions to health care are pretty hard to develop. The easiest one is to try and keep costs low by limiting malpractice costs, etc, and then just hand out medical stipends (like food stamps) to lower-income people so they can afford care.
But basic economic incentives are in favor of waste in the system -- because pricing medical care as a product means that more transactions need to occur to make more money. For example, a doctor who owns or is friends with the operators of a CT scanning center is simply more likely to have their patients receive unnecessary CT scans; the incentives currently in place only pay doctors per procedure, not to actually do what is best for the patient.
Furthermore, most Cato-approved solutions involve consumers buying a new health insurance contract every year or so. But these incentives threaten to shrink our risk pools and push sick people out of insurance. In the year following a person being diagnosed with cancer or another long-term disease, what incentive does an insurance company have to pick up these patients? If genetic counseling turns out to be successful, what incentive does an insurers have to provide care to someone more likely of developing a serious disease?
Simply put, in a purely free trade system, wouldn't the average person's premiums rise steeply as you got older (or sicker), since you'd clearly need more health care? How do we deal with those things?
Contrast with the public police or fire department system -- people who live in high-crime areas, or in more flammable houses, don't have to pay more for police and fire protection. But if you want to pay homeowner's insurance on an expensive house, it will cost you more.
Economics and game theory require a person to be able to attach a dollar value to every outcome in order to make a rational decision. For homeowner's insurance, the dollar value is the value of the house and its contents. What is the dollar value on receiving better cancer care? On your child not dying from some unexpected disease? These problems strain the rational-agent model of economics in unpredictable ways. Any GOP or libertarian solution is going to have to deal with them.