On Blogging Heads with Matt Yglesias and I think I know how to share it now. Nope, the video shows up in my preview but as a link on the actual site.
http://bloggingheads.tv/diavlogs/35937
We do a long ramble moving from Osama to the Fed to Health Care.
I get the feeling that the discussion on health care is not easily absorbed. Either I am mistaken or blogging heads commenters missed the point.
The core case is this:
Look free market medicine might be a great idea, but there is no precedent for it happening. The real choice is between an stingy government run sector that actually spends less money on health care or a less stingy government subsidized sector that spends more money on health care.
Further, in any case there is nothing akin to consumer soverignty in Medicine because first drugs have to be approved by the FDA, or else its illegal to prescribe them. Then you have to convince a licensed physician to prescribe them or else its illegal to buy them.
And, remember the part of medicine that does most of the curing is the actual medicine part, which is the most fiercely regulated.
A true free market in medicine would let people create whatever drugs they wanted, however they wanted and would let consumers buy whatever drugs they wanted however they wanted. If someone chose to get the advice or consul of a physician then fine, but there would be no law making them do so.
Given that this is not likely to happen any time soon our real choice is between bloated medicine and austerity. Since in practice Socialized Medicine is austere medicine, I wonder if this could actually get Bryan Caplan on board for fully socialized health care.
3 comments
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Thursday ~ May 5th, 2011 at 10:49 am
Joe Godwin
I don’t say why that is such a hard point to grasp. We have government enforced cartels, so we get cartel type prices. Nothing on the consumer side is really going to change that point.
Thursday ~ May 5th, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Brian McDonald
Yglesias disproves his own argument in his conversation with you, when he points out that in Africa patients go to witch doctors even if they have free clinics available to them. Unless you ban private purchases of medical care, public healthcare austerity just leads to more private consumption.
Unless, of course, the stingy public sector can meet its patients’ needs for false hope and reassurance while staying stingy. As Yglesias points out, doctors in private systems have an incentive to push for more expensive care, and doctors in public systems are bureaucrats with an incentive to push for low cost options. In the public system, the patients are still reassured, and the system saves money.
But this really has nothing to do with whether the system is public or private – what matters is how doctors are paid. If you want doctors to act like bureaucrats, just put them on salaries. Some private hospitals already do that, and there’s no reason why we couldn’t have a completely private system where all medical professionals were paid a salary rather than fee for service.
So, I think Yglesias’ argument is false.
Wednesday ~ May 11th, 2011 at 12:41 pm
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