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.
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- 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
- COVID Lessons: The Health Care Shutdown
- It’s fortunate that COVID-19 was not as bad as the experts said, because our response was almost entirely to make the problem worse. We shut down everything that could help, including health care for co-morbidities. We locked the healthy and the sick together, and cut people off from routine care. Most of the deaths “from” COVID-19 were probably due more to our response than to the virus itself.
- Community health acts to improve Obamacare
- Democrats now want to talk about how to improve Obamacare. Here’s how to do it.
- Why government-funded cancer research is dangerously unlike the Manhattan Project
- A “Manhattan Project” for cancer is likely to delay cancer cures, and make what cancer cures we find more expensive—like the Epipen. And kill people, like the original Manhattan Project.
- Why does the EpiPen cost so much?
- With Mylan raising the cost of the EpiPen even as the EpiPen enters the public domain, people are complaining—but they’re complaining in ways that will raise health costs even more.
- Strangling the iPhone of health care
- We have no idea what great improvements in health care we have strangled through our current system of government regulations, subsidies, and tax incentives.
- 17 more pages with the topic health care, and other related pages
Remember: Trump reassures crowd after assassination attempt fails. (read more…)
Blogroll
- According To Hoyt
- Ace of Spades HQ
- The Anchoress
- John Hayward
- Legal Insurrection
- National Motorists blog
- The Other McCain
- samizdata.net
- Sultan Knish