Health care the Chicago way
Doc Zero points out the same thing I wrote about as gravity-based health care. Supply and demand is not a policy, it’s a law. Now, most likely the government policy will be to charge $90 for a $100 service and then extract the rest in taxes and fees as Doctor Zero describes1. But if government policy truly pretends that a service which the market prices at $100 can be priced at $90, then either people will stop providing that service, or they will demand that the cost be made up in other ways.
At its most obvious, you’ll have to use bribes to actually get that service; at its worst you’ll have to grease the doctor’s palm in other less appealing ways. As a customer you’ll have to engage in dishonest activity to get, for example, health care. But what’s really bad about such a system is that it attracts the dishonest as providers as well. If a doctor can’t make a living by charging the legal price, honest people won’t go into the business. Over time, the people who go into the business will be the kind of people who enjoy a culture of corruption.
And we’ll be under the knife in more ways than one.
And remember that you won’t just be paying into the livelihood of the person providing the service—you’ll also be paying for the persons monitoring prices.
↑
- The Myth of Price Controls: John Hayward at Hot Air
- “Most forms of government intervention simply force other people to pay the price, without really changing it. Nothing is more expensive than ‘free’ single-payer government health care—it extracts huge payments from a relatively small group of heavily burdened taxpayers, and creates a dependency class which receives benefits in excess of the minor taxes they pay into the system. This inevitably causes the overall price to increase, because it hinders competition.”
More health care
- Health care reform: walking into quicksand
- The first step, when you walk into quicksand, is to walk back out. Health providers today are in the business of dealing with human resources departments and government agencies. Their customers are bureaucrats. Their best innovations will be in the fields of paperwork and red tape. If we want their innovations to be health care innovations, their customers need to be their patients.
- Robbing Peter to pay Peter… later
- Robbing from Peter to pay Paul? Government goes one better: robbing from Peter to pay Peter. As usual, Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on taxes, because Lewis Carroll is the best writer for the layman on anything. “However legal it may be to pay what never has been lent, this style of business seems to me extremely inconvenient!”
- Keep plucking that Congress
- The more people who can afford their own health care and insurance, the easier it will be to care for the rest.
- San Francisco-style budgeting
- The health “reform” bill appears to be bringing San Francisco-style budgeting to Washington.
- Discouraging health insurance competition
- The largest problem with our current health care system is that competition is actively discouraged at every level. Rather than making that problem worse, we should be encouraging real competition among insurance providers and health care providers.
- 11 more pages with the topic health care, and other related pages