![]() In fact, our semi-statist system uses resources more efficiently than fully nationalized systems in other wealthy countries-with equal if not superior results. This in part is how other countries seem to spend less on medical care than we do. Waiting months for surgery or doing without because the government won’t pay for it is a cost, although it doesn’t show up in the budget. Such an approach might lower total money expenses, but so what? The point shouldn’t be to cut the total bill regardless of the consequences. It could also license medical technology to avoid “wasteful duplication,” another form of rationing. In some ways, this already happens in Medicare, which refuses to cover certain services out of budgetary concerns. The easiest way for the government to lower society’s overall medical bill would be for it to engage in triage, dictating who gets what kind of service. Or the policymakers might go directly to rationing as a way to control costs. If, for example, price controls are imposed, supply will shrink relative to demand, and when the shortages become acute, the bureaucracy will step in to ration medical services. If the planners ignore the real determinants of rising prices and attempt to get them “under control,” it will make things worse by creating shortages and other problems. Prices emerge from this tangled system that is result of decades of government intrusion. Rather they are the product of a government-manipulated, semi-competitive, supply-and-demand process. Prices in the medical industry today, no matter what the advocates of government control believe, are not arbitrary numbers plucked out of the air, or the result of sheer profiteering and greed. This is too bad, because the solution lies with option 2. If the price of a particular set of services rises faster than other prices year after year -and there is no free market in those services-there are two things you can do: 1) give bureaucrats greater power to control costs-this is called “reform-or 2) look for the ways that existing policies create price inflation, then repeal those interventions.įor medical care the juggernaut is heading toward option 1, with the insurance companies and providers climbing aboard fast in order to cut their deals early. Once again, we see an important principle at work: No matter how much the government controls an industry, when something goes awry, economic freedom will get the blame. ![]() ![]() When it did so, the advocates of Medicare (and fully nationalized medicine) blamed the (semi-)private providers of services, and now Obama threatens more control than they already endure. Critics warned that, as a welfare program, Medicare would explode beyond all official budget estimates. In the 1960s the national government took over funding of medical care for the elderly. Obama has already recruited the competitiveness lobby, claiming that more centralized control of medical care will lighten (!) the burden on American business, enabling it to better compete against companies in countries with socialized medicine.Īnother strategy is to blame “private”-sector medicine for the out-of-control Medicare program, which has a $35 trillion unfunded liability and is helping to break the federal budget. Enlist the budget-deficit hawks in the effort to further bureaucratize decision-making in medical care. If we don’t reform how health care is delivered in this country, then we are not going to be able to get a handle on that.” Economic illiteracy will be hazardous to your health.īarack Obama says, “he most significant driver - by far - of our long-term debt and our long-term deficits is ever-escalating health care costs. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |