Why Free markets won't work with health care
In the Review-Journal's Jan. 19 editorial, "Socialized medicine," I suspect that, once again, libertarian dogma trumped microeconomics 101.
For essential products, the market dynamics of free competition do not work. It is no accident that we do not rely on market dynamics to provide fire protection, law enforcement or military services. As a society, we have implicitly decided that basic health care services are not a discretionary product. No one will condone, for instance, letting a woman in labor pains deliver her baby unassisted because she does not have the means to pay for obstetrical care.
Once it is accepted that, in extremis, health care is a basic right, market dynamics fly out the window: Providing universal access is a great deal more cost-effective than rationing access to the insured until the disease progresses to the emergency room or the intensive care stage.
It would be heartening to see the Review-Journal's editorial writers take the trouble of conducting a return-on-investment analysis of, say, the Medicare program compared to any private health insurance plan, or to compare the return on investment in public health parameters in a Canadian province to the same parameters in a comparable American state on a dollar-for-dollar basis. This is, indeed, what the National Academy of Sciences has done. But the editorial writers condense the whole analysis into the one scary squeal: socialized medicine!
Ideologues are not amenable to rational argumentation when the drift of the argument fails to confirm their preconceived notions.
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