On page 1 of today’s New York Times, there is an article titled “Health Care, Vexing to Clinton, Is Now at Top of Bush’s Agenda.” Typical of The Times and the Left, the article treats the continuing rise in health care costs as a phenomenon of the free market and presents government intervention as the solution.
The article is an illustration of the massive ignorance and evasion that prevails on this subject. The truth is that the rise in health care costs is exactly what one should expect from the government’s long-standing policy of collectivizing the cost of medical care. This is a policy it has carried on since World War II, when it first began to foster medical “insurance.”
Under so-called medical insurance, the typical insured patient pays little or nothing of the cost of any medical treatment, however routine it may be. Such medical “insurance” is comparable to “insurance” for food purchases. It simply means that there is little or no cost to the individual when he buys medical care.
I used to ask my [evening] students to imagine that after class, we would all go to a restaurant for a late dinner, on the understanding that everyone was free to order whatever he liked and the bill would be evenly divided. Thus, if there were thirty students in the class and someone ordered a $20 steak instead of a $5 hamburger, the additional cost to him would be 50 cents. Under such an arrangement, everyone would have the incentive to order anything he wanted, because he would bear very little of the cost. But since everyone would soon do this, the cost to everyone would end up being far higher than it would have been had everyone had to pay his own way.
Think of the consequences of the check being split a million, ten million, or a hundred million ways and you can see what’s actually wrong with our present system of collectivized medical care.
This is a subject I’ve written about at much greater length, in a pamphlet titled “The Real Right to Medical Care Versus Socialized Medicine” and in my book Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics. I’ll return to it in future posts.
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Yes, consider the consequences:
If the waiter were a member of AMA.
If the waiter had a federal license.
If the waiter needed continuing educaation.
If the restaurant could only operate if the permits were allowed based on services in the area.
If the food were licensed through a patent system to be used woth a rent paid to the license holder.
If you would die if you did not get your big mac.
If the waiter had to go off and do more important stuff.
Analogies………………..
Socialized “universale and free” healtcare scares the heck out of me! I hope enough people wake up before it’s too late.
It is stuff like this that make me wonder if Anarchocapitalists support formals rights for everyone or if they support substantial rights for everyone.
I NEVER hear Libertarians argue for substantial rights in fact it seems like they want people to have as many and extensive FORMAL rights as possible but as few and as encumbered substanantial rights as possible.
They simply ASSUME that charity WOULD take care of the needs of the poor in their ideal society. But this simply ALWAYS goes unproven.
Ofcourse they couldn’t ever prove this even in principle because that simply wouldn’t be the case.
People in general are selfish and egotistical and don’t care about the poor at all.
The poor would be MUCH worse of and MUCH greater in number in a Stateless society than now because of this.
Kristen:
The beauty of the free market is that people don’t have to “care” about the poor at all. They simply have to “care” that they can make a profit from providing goods and services to the poor. And since the “poor” can’t afford to pay premium prices there is every incentive to provide low cost products and services to them.
There certainly is a place for private charity , and I don’t think the fact that Americans donate about 2% of their incomes to private organizations is chump change. Relieved of the burden of government taxation, certainly they would contribute more.
And I’m perplexed that the same people who don’t care about the poor can elect politicians who supposedly do.
Kristaian Joensen, if I read “substantial” correctly, you mean something like a “right” to “health care”? Please correct me if I’m wrong, the rest of my comment depends on that assumption.
The problem with a “right” to “health care” is that “health care” is provided by other people. In order for me to have a “right” to the labor of others, those other people are by definition my slaves.
If I have a right to myself, my labors, my property, and others have equal rights, I cannot then have a “right” to their labors, their property. There is, therefore, no “right” to healthcare, only the power to extract it. That power can be economic, that I pay someone to provide the health care, I can use sympathy “charity” to ask for it, or I can use coercion.
Libertarians are not arguing for Utopia. There will always be those who, for whatever reason, fall through the cracks and fail to receive whatever it is they need. Socialists DO argue that they will eliminate such failures with their planning and intervention, and time has demonstrated that those claims are false.
Full liberty creates the greatest opportunity for individuals to build the world they wish to build. You are not alone in your concern for the poor, something that is shown in the astounding levels of charitable giving everywhere, and is greater where people keep more of their own money to do with as they wish. Your own comment that people are not going to give unless coerced is directly belied by your own concern for those who are unfortunate.
Your assertion that the poor would do worse without coercive government has no basis in fact. It is also sadly common among those who learned about life from schooling instead of living.
“People in general are selfish and egotistical and don’t care about the poor at all. ”
So we need self-less politicians to loot defenseless people who are wealthy mearly because they engage in the division of labor, so that politicians can do what? Serve their term self-lessly? And then try to get reelected by their self-less acts? Get real.
“The poor would be MUCH worse of and MUCH greater in number in a Stateless society than now because of this.”
Uhm no. In case facts don’t appear on your radar – the introduction of so called “social safety nets” has actually increased the poverty level in real terms. I’m talking about real poverty not 3 times the average food intake of 1955, as the current “scientific” methods attempt to measure. In case logic is also not in your box of tools – how can a program that subsidizes the very thing it tries to eliminate possibly help??
Let me tell you something – being poor in the US (1990-95) was MUCH better than being “classless” in the USSR (1982-90). Sure “universal health care” was free – but where was it? It must have been only in Moscow. IS that was what you want: Free unavailable health care?
The very reason that health care is less available now than in the past – is precisely because it is being subsidized to the extent that it is. The high prices are a result of severe government intervention. If you really hate the poor – subsidize it more. If you really hate everyone but the poor – create universal health care – and watch the number of the poor multiply as the non-poor slowly start leaving the country or at least pouring their money elsewhere.
“I NEVER hear Libertarians argue for substantial rights in fact it seems like they want people to have as many and extensive FORMAL rights as possible but as few and as encumbered substanantial rights as possible.”
I don’t even know what you are trying to say. The only rights Libertarians recognize is property rights. That is the rights of self-ownership and the extention of that ownership to tangible and even non-tangible things that are scarce. I don’t see what you mean as “many” rights – unless you want to define exactly all the things that are “property”. If by right you mean going to a doctor, having the doctor negotiate a payment with an agency that loots money from innocent people, and then providing you a service with stolen goods – then NO – slavery is strictly a Socialist institution.
I can’t afford to “care”, Kristian.
This government has completely priced me out of the market.
In his pamphlet, Reisman puts equal emphasis on subsidized medicine and government monopoly on the supply of healthcare. There’s a lot of talk about limiting the demand, which is good, but we also need to free the supply by removing governmental restraints on it through licensing and through the AMA’s stranglehold on medical schools and practices.
The government loving NY Times always fails to address the real cause of the inflation of healthcare prices in particular and service prices more generally.
Don’t forget about the negative impact on health care prices by our fourth branch of government, the Federal Reserve. This evil institution quietly raises the prices of essential services through the devaluation of money. Their constant and perpetual increasing of the money supply has increased the prices on essential services like education, legal assistance, local government and health care. It has also increased the prices of commodities and raw materials like fuel and metals.
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