Quote:
Originally posted by Tyrone Slothrop
I don't mind talking to libertarians while drinking, particularly if it's a Peter Franus zinfandel or something of that sort, but it seems to me that the "let's revert to the free market" impulse is particularly unhelpful when you're talking about health care, for the reasons I suggested above.
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Because health care is considered too important to leave to the unregulated free market, it is rigorously supervised by politicians. They have brought us Medicare, Medicaid, billions of government research dollars and new legislation every year to regulate health-insurance companies and HMOs. Federal regulation runs to hundreds of thousands of pages.
Has this reduced the price of health care?
No. Every year it becomes more expensive, less user-friendly, more inaccessible – causing well-meaning politicians (and those of the other kind) to impose even more regulations.
If the health-care industry had gone through what the computer industry has experienced, today you might have health-care-at-home, prescriptions that cost a dollar or two, and surgery for only $100 – making health insurance unnecessary except for catastrophic events.
Does that seem far-fetched? It shouldn’t. That’s what health care was like before the federal government started to intervene in the 1960s.
