Re: free-market health care

Charles Featherstone sends along the following in response to my post on free-market health care:

“We won’t have a proper market in health care until employer-paid insurance (and really, third-party payment of all non-emergency health care costs) goes away. Because as long as health care is a benefit of employment and a third party is contractually obligated to pay my bills, demand and supply will constantly be out of whack. Simply opting out of medicare will do little to change this.

There are physicians, however, who have opted out of insurance completely, lowering their costs and creating a real and honest customer relationship. It is interesting to watch this at work.”

Charles is absolutely correct that America’s health care problems are rooted in the over-reliance on third party payers, which is a direct result of government polices. See here for more on how Richard Nixon and Ted Kennedy forced the American people into HMOs in order to solve the problems created by prior interventions in the market, here for more information on doctors who are taking the lead in creating a free-market in medicine, and here for a proposal to give individuals more control over their health care.

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8:18 pm on January 17, 2006