I'm skeptical of this to say the least. It puts a huge amount of trust in private enterprise to behave in an ethical manner.
Transitioning to this sort of system would also seem to involve a period where we jump into the deep end of the swimming pool with weights tied around our ankles.
It's time to get serious about health care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removmg unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken:
1. Eliminate all licensing requirements for medical schools, hospitals, pharmacies, and medical doctors and other health care personnel. Their supply would almost instantly increase, prices would fall, and a greater variety of health care services would appear on the market.
Competing voluntary accreditation agencies would take the place of compulsory government licensing--if health care providers believe that such accreditation would enhance their own reputation, and that their consumers care about reputation, and are willing to pay for it.
Because consumers would no longer be duped into believing that there is such a thing as a "national standard" of health care, they will increase their search costs and make more discriminating health care choices.
2. Eliminate all government restrictions on the production and sale of pharmaceutical products and medical devices. This means no more Food and Drug Administration, which presently hinders innovation and increases costs.
Costs and prices would fall, and a wider variety of better products would reach the market sooner. The market would force consumers to act in accordance with their own--rather than the government's--risk assessment. And competing drug and device manufacturers and sellers, to safeguard against product liability suits as much as to attract customers, would provide increasingly better product descriptions and guarantees.
3. Deregulate the health insurance industry. Private enterprise can offer insurance against events over whose outcome the insured possesses no control. One cannot insure oneself against suicide or bankruptcy, for example, because it is in one's own hands to bring these events about.
Because of legal restrictions on the health insurers' right of refusal--to exclude any individual risk as uninsurable--the present health-insurance system is only partly concerned with insurance. The industry cannot discriminate freely among different groups' risks.
As a result, health insurers cover a multitude of uninnsurable risks, alongside, and pooled with, genuine insurance risks. They do not discriminate among various groups of people which pose significantly different insurance risks. The industry thus runs a system of income redistribution--benefiting irresponsible actors and high-risk groups at the expense of responsible individuals and low risk groups. Accordingly the industry's prices are high and ballooning.
4. Eliminate all subsidies to the sick or unhealthy. Subsidies create more of whatever is being subsidized. Subsidies for the ill and diseased breed illness and disease, and promote carelessness, indigence, and dependency. If we eliminate them, we would strengthen the will to live healthy lives and to work for a living. In the first instance, that means abolishing Medicare and Medicaid.
I assume that this is a joke, right?
So anyone can call themselves a medical expert and dispense "medicines"... we're going back to middle ages with the help of Oprah and the "free market".
It's interesting that when muppets like this talk of the Free Market, what they actually want is de-regulation, read as, open slather for corporations.
Mind you, I would be happy to charge Hans-Hermann Hoppe for the benefits of my medical expertise. Initial diagnosis - insanity characterised by bouts of severe delusion.
Still, Ron Paul would approve.
Last edited by Groakes; 06-04-2009, 05:12 PM.
Stopped my 13 year old dead in his tracks today when he was spouting some anti-government, libertarian clap-trap:
"Who would plough the roads?" [We get 15feet of snow or so a year up here]
"The local town would."
"You mean the local government would, then, right?"
We would all plough the roads as part of our anarchist commune/kibbutz!
This is definitely one of the most silly and ideologically over-stuffed things I've read in a long time.
Health is not a commodity, it is the foundation of the ability to engage life on any level.
Having just returned from the emergency room a little while ago, I can say that I especially like the licensing of doctors, regulated antiseptic standards and all those other people who hold doctors and nurses to good standards.
I believe the thinking is that in the absence of government intervention the market will regulate itself based on some sort of community standard. As I said it seems very dubious to me - at least with today's corporate America.
Pure free market economics seems to be not unlike communism - sounds good on paper, but practically - it has the potential for horrible tyranny.
Sounds great for the healthy. For the sick, not quite so good...
Rather reminds me of the Monty Python Insurance sketch.
You're kidding! Look how well deregulation worked for the banks
Oh absolutely. It cannot possibly fail.
As the government has announced here in the US that Medicare will be bankrupt by 2017 and Social Security by somewhere in the 2030`s, it will be interesting to see what plan they come up with to fix the system. My fear is that whatever fix is chosen, it will be painful. I don`t think we can get out of that part by now. But sometimes the fix is worse than the problem. Like giving GM 30 billion to keep afloat, only to have them go bankrupt anyway. Now we are 30 billion further in debt with the same results had we let them go bankrupt months ago. Healthcare, I fear, will have the same problems in fixing it.
I've got to disagree, that 30 billion was money to tide them over until they could go into bankruptcy in an orderly way, as opposed to going belly up and liquidating all of their assets and in the process bringing the stock market down even further - when it had just stabilized. Absolutely necessary IMO.
Now to pay for the debt, we just need a tax rate similair to the one we had when we were a successful nation...
A higher tax rate? Uck.
We can agree to disagree on that one.
Well, isn't the spent 14 trillion money in circulation? So wouldn't that mean we can't really pay off the bills?