All Entries Tagged With: "free markets"
A Simple Solution – What We Should Do To Fix Health Care
In order to truly fix our health care problem, it’s important that we understand how we got into this mess in the first place. On the premise that “those that don’t know history are doomed to repeat it”, in the previous article I tried to explain just that, going back nearly 70 years to give a brief history of our health care woes.
I noted that a viable alternative should drive down costs, improve overall efficiency and effectiveness, and stimulate healthier individuals. To do this we must first acknowledge the lunacy of our current insurance system and understand their appropriate role. We must also consider, whether or not the government option would truly cut costs. The idea is what I call “the Walmart effect.” Because places like Walmart (or Costco) are such large retail providers, they have the power to influence production costs. The threat of not being able to sell your product in the largest chain in the world will drive down any cost. Similar to Walmart, if the government is providing most of the health coverage, in theory, medical costs go down.
I don’t think that will work though. If you’re in the medical field and you’ve seen your wages sharply cut, and then to receive compensation you have to go through government- an entity with the (unconstitutional) power to simply print money, problems are gonna come in heaps. Quite obviously sensitivity to cost and cost-effectiveness will go down. To avoid having people “game” the system the government would have to bog the system down with regulations. We’ll have what amounts to “price-fixing”. We’ve tried that before, most notably under Richard Nixon; it didn’t work very well.
Our Current Health Care Mess – And How Did We Get There?
November 7, 2009, the United States House of Representatives passed a health care reform bill on a vote of 220-215. The bill currently contains a “public option” which would allow individuals and companies to enroll in a government provided health coverage plan. I’m careful, here, not to simply label the public option as “government run health care”. No doubt our health care is broken, but is the government’s public option really the best way to serve the citizens (and even immigrants)? Does universal coverage necessitate a government option? I suggest that it doesn’t.
Let me say up front, I support the notion of universal coverage. From my current knowledge, I consider the morality of access to health care to be of higher consideration than the economics of it. I do not think that economics governs moral decisions but I also don’t think enlightened morality has to be in conflict with market economics. Is there a, more-or-less, free market solution to provide everyone with health coverage? It would have to drive down costs, improve overall efficiency and effectiveness, and stimulate healthier individual lives as well. Before outlining an alternative that could accomplish all of these goals, we must take a brief tour of how we got into this mess in the first place so we don’t make the same mistakes.
