Response to Socialized Health Care proposal

We Libertarians are flattered that Dr. Weinstein feels our opinions are important enough to attempt to disparage them. I suppose, since he provides no other evidence, that he thinks the current health care situation is a counter example to the assertion that private enterprise is a better way to approach the economy than governmental command and control. Instead it is merely further proof of how quickly government bureaucratic influence can degrade the quality of an institution. He claims that healthcare in this country was at one time the crown jewel of Western civilization. While I think that overstates the previous situation, I certainly agree that the health care delivery system in this country was better before the federal government got involved. The period to which he must be referring was before the government institutionalized the present system of health care insurance by manipulating the tax code for employers, before the advent of Medicare and Medicaid, before the government micromanaged drugs and created monopoly cartels and before hospitals were forced to take patients regardless of ability to pay. The results speak for themselves and I'm amazed that any thinking person could propose that the solution is to increase government involvement. He is right that we should quit what we are doing but that means get the federal government out of health care rather than continuing on the current disastrous course.

Contrary to his implication, Libertarians do not believe in some free enterprise utopia, we merely believe that despite the flaws freedom in all areas of our lives is preferable to the alternative. We believe that the grand social experiment of our founding fathers certainly proved superior to all the grand socialist experiments and that returning to the simple limited federal government they designed would produce far better results than all the other alternatives. Every single grand socialist experiment has proceeded to the same end; strong persons take charge and mold the system to their advantage. The poor remain poor and are further enslaved, quality and quantity declines and scarce goods and services (like health care) are rationed first to the governors. Eventually the system collapses in bankruptcy and chaos. Command and control economies have never succeeded in producing goods and services as well as even partially free enterprise so generally most people in such systems are worse off than before. The populace becomes equally poor and desperate but equal opportunity for betterment is a far more desirable goal and is what drives so many to want to become Americans. Even the staunch Chinese Communists recognize that capitalism as a superior way to provide goods and services!

The concerns that government attempts to manage health care will lead to decline are indeed valid and already occurring as Dr. Weinstein noted. Many doctors limit or refuse to provide care for those on Medicare. The FDA has made it nearly impossible for start up drug companies to enter the field leading to a market dominated by a few established drug companies with virtual monopolies and the resulting high prices. Doctors and pharmacies are so confused by the current system they seem to prefer dealing with insurance bureaucrats than cash customers. I've had many try to charge me more for paying them cash for their services upon delivery seeming to prefer to wait for some bureaucrat to dictate the price and pay them months later after a long and expensive exchange of forms.

I could go on and on, question how health care differs from food, housing, transportation and the other basics of modern life but basically I find myself repeating the same free market versus socialism argument. Free market examples are scarce in our current society. The federal government controls workers' pay, hours and often even job assignments, inflates prices via taxes and regulations, tells us what we can or more often cannot consume, dictates how goods are to be packaged and services delivered. Many of the flaws in our current system are easily traced to government mismanagement. Why not try a free market approach for a change? We've certainly already proved to most people's satisfaction that the current clumsy centrally managed approach doesn't work. Why would anyone wish for more management and even less freedom of choice? Please look at some of the examples on the Internet. An excellent start would be Mark Valenti's fine exposition of the problems with socialized health care, with many links to examples of the problems in some of the countries often cited as successfully socialized. Some of his points are: it reduces incentives and even blocks the ability of patients to find the best possible prices for the best possible services available, eliminates physician incentives to provide competitive care and drug company incentives to provide new drugs and treatments, the government makes it almost impossible for new companies to enter the market, it leads to further elimination of your freedom of choice, if the government is paying for your healthcare than it will feel free to institute bans on behavior that are deemed to increase the costs like banning smoking, unsafe sex and any other "risky" behaviors, you will be forced to comply with programs to improve your mental and physical health. The power of the government will be used to force you to accept treatments and medicines from the most politically connected health care providers. To get a feel for some of the issues of socialized medicine and free market alternatives enter health care into the search field at the Libertarian Party main site at lp.org, this is a good one to start with.

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