As an essential service that invokes strong emotions, medical care invites government meddling. Modern medicine has made incredible things possible, but many life-saving procedures remain very expensive. In the natural course of new technologies, prices start high and come down over time. Tragically, government regulation in rich countries has kept prices high so many life-saving technologies remain out of reach for people in poor countries. Efficiency is not just about economic productivity in terms of having more stuff. It also means saving lives.
Even if we had a nonviolent market for medical services, some advanced life-saving technologies would remain too expensive for most people. Fortunately, the nature of the need for these services presents a solution that the market readily provides: insurance. This means people who don’t need services right now can buy insurance and pool their resources. When they need an expensive service, the insurance company, which makes money by providing the service of pooling risk, pays for it. Of course this is not a perfect solution, but it is a very powerful way to give the poor access to treatment they might never be able to afford individually.
Unfortunately, many insurance corporations end up with the same special privileges as the best government sponsors. This leads to lower accountability to the consumer by limiting choices, often resulting in denial of coverage and hospital bills that bankrupt families. In some places, government has taken over the medical insurance industry as the sole provider. This may have an effect on helping the poorest of the poor temporarily, but eventually it hurts everyone by making care less accessible or by inefficiently diverting so many resources into the medical industry that other areas of the economy suffer.
We all want reassurance that the medical care we get is safe. This demand is enough to drive a lot of resources towards safety and consistency of care. Many governments exploit our fear of medical tragedy to take over this essential market function. They require licenses to provide treatment, approval to distribute drugs, and obedience to regulations for all the ways medical care is paid for. When governments require a license, they force people to meet their standards, which often stifles innovation. The standards are often meaningless, but because people trust government, they will accept treatment from anyone as long as they have government approval. That’s how most horror stories occur, rather than from people working without a license. Where governments control drug safety, the results are staggering: millions of people have died from government-approved drugs, and millions more have died while life-saving drugs were kept off the market. Government control of the medical industry has the same disastrous effects on prices, availability, safety, and customer satisfaction as in any other industry.
Chapter 7 Section II From FREEDOM! by Adam Kokesh
I am the author of FREEDOM!, a book endorsed (I mean banned) by the US Department of “Justice.” You can get a copy here. I’m running for Not-President in 2020 on the platform of the peaceful, orderly, and responsible dissolution of the United States federal government. You can find out more here. You can find an event near you here. Whoever has the top comment on this post after 24 hours can claim a free signed copy of FREEDOM! by sending me a message with their address.
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