Thursday, February 8, 2007

Some considerations on health care

There is a movement dedicated to bringing about socialized health care in the "United States." Such a movement, as we have seen in "Canada," would ruin the health care market and make it conditional to political considerations instead of consumer demand. And contrarily to statist claims, it drives spending on health care up, up, always up.

To understand why the health care market is fucked up, we need to understand the main considerations of freedom and efficacy in a market, which are (in increasing order of integration):

(1) Peaceful competition.
(2) Division of labour.
(3) Technological progress.

The health care market is under attack by the State on all three fronts.

(1) Insurance companies are not allowed to compete in offering the best packages- they are forced by the State to inflate their prices by providing all sorts of needful and needless treatments. This is all good and well for the big insurance companies, because it prevents competition from smaller and more adaptable insurance businesses. Furthermore, the State favours corporations providing insurance over individual initiative. Both of these drive prices up, make insurance out of the reach of the poor, and prevents competition.
The alternative now proposed by statists- to force people by law to buy insurance- would only drive prices even higher and give more power to the big insurance companies. As usual, statism is corporatism at its finest.

(2) The medical guilds do not prevent vertical division (doctors can specialize in all kinds of areas) but they do prevent horizontal division, thus ensuring that the price of labour remains high.

(3) FDA regulations prevent medical advances in order to fulfill political ends, depriving us of life-saving medications and medical tools.

1 comment:

commercial general liability insurance said...

Agreed with you as now the health care plans are becoming out of reach of poor people as the prices are going high and high day by day. I wish that there should be such kind of plans that are tailored according the users need. Its useless as of having those coverage that one doesn't need in the policy.