Most foes of Obamacare support reform, but reform that liberalizes, rather than further burdening, the health care industry. Individuals have a right to liberty, and free markets prove inherently better than rule-bound bureaucracies at providing goods and services. Yes, even medicine.
At least one health-care commissar admits this superiority . . . but then promptly suppresses that knowledge.
Donald Berwick, President Obama’s Medicare czar, opines in the Wall Street Journal that the “right way” to bring down health care costs is by improving health care.
“Computers, cars, TVs and telephones today do more than they ever have, and the cost of these products has consistently dropped,” says Berwick. “The companies that make computers and microwaves didn’t get there by cutting what they offer: They achieved success by making their products better and more efficient.”
They did, eh? And did profit incentives, competition, and the coordinating functions of prices that are characteristic of market processes have anything to do with it? Are the firms that sell these improved products mere departments of the government — or profit-seeking companies obliged to satisfy consumers or go out of business?
Berwick points to one of the least subsidized and regulated sectors of modern life, and yet the idea of a freer market for health-care products and services doesn’t occur to him. The key to emulating freer, more successful industries, he burbles, is to further hamper an already hobbled medical market.
It’s like saying we’ll cure a guy with pneumonia by also giving him emphysema.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
5 replies on “Free Markets: Poison or Cure?”
Berwick was the one quoted as also saying how “in love” he was with the UK’s rationing medical model. These people are masters at double-speak and are either very evil because they think we are too stupid to research, via the internet, what they said to a different audience. Or are they just completely unaware of the moral bankruptcy of their views?
The chiropractic model of above down inside out health care stands in the eaves ready and very capable of competing for the health care dollars in a free market system.
The current disease care system is completely upside down and extremely profitable for the government subsidized butchery of the American people.
“Health Care” is an effort to improve and maintain good health for the duration of a lifespan which includes death. This effort must begin with the individual taking responsibility for their own adventure in mortality. Only when Americans stop looking to experts to save them will we truly grow up as a society. WAKE UP AMERICA!!!
Unfortunately, the health insurance companies dictate not free market. They determine what they will pay for a procedure, a hospital bed, etc by what they determine to be usual and customary rate in a specific zip code. It can vary from one zip code to another.
Medical brokers from Canada send Canadians who are paying cash to the least expensive zip code for medical care in the US. There is a huge medical facility in Sioux Falls, SD which seems way to large for the surrounding population. This is one of the locations Canadians are sent to for their medical care as it is lower cost than elsewhere for their cash payment.
I have a neighbor who has to go to multiple specialists to see what is wrong with her, instead of one doc having enough training to have a strong idea where to send her. She and her family are having to figure it out and determine what specialist to go see next. This is a circus and is way too costly to go to multiple specialists to R/O what she doesn’t have wrong.
The government is never going to advocate for LESS power. It would be like now expecting the federal government, via the Supreme Court, to impartially limit the power that it has taken.
In the history of the government of our country, only Lincoln and Washington had power and relinquished it in favor of it being given to the people.
Berwick is a looooong way from either of those two statesmen, more Orwellian.
[…] Free Markets: Poison or Cure? Most foes of Obamacare support reform, but reform that liberalizes, rather than further burdening, the health care industry. Individuals have a right to liberty, and free markets prove inherently better than rule-bound bureaucracies at providing goods and services. Yes, even medicine…. https://thisiscommonsense.org////?p=6377 […]