Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
I keep coming back to what Steven Waldman, Editor-In-Chief and Co-Founder of BeliefNet, said about the current status of health care in the U.S.:
* A system is immoral [immoralities deleted.]
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All utopians think that immoral systems can be corrected by limiting someone else's freedom. But what actually happens is that one immoral system is simply replaced by another. In the case where a private immoral system is replaced by a public immoral system, you not only get immorality, but risk tyranny, and guarantee inefficiency.
I doubt that there are many people on this board who remember Richard Nixon's abortive attempt to control inflation back in the early 70s. He set up an elaborate price control regime - Stabilization, I think it was called. Thereafter, inflation got entirely out of control. Meanwhile, we had various shortages, the most famous of which was the oil shortage, but the most important of which was the toilet paper shortage. Everyone was stocking up...
I have no doubt that there are things that could be done to make the current system a better one. But government control of economic resources results in shortages, rationing, and ultimately, corrupt political allocation. I do not know what WILL work with health care, but I damn well know what WON'T work, and that's turning over the responsibility to the government.
EDIT: Today's Wall Street Journal has an article by the Dean of the Harvard Medical School
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...994054014.html that is worth reading:
"In discussions with dozens of health-care leaders and economists, I find near unanimity of opinion that, whatever its shape, the final legislation that will emerge from Congress will markedly accelerate national health-care spending rather than restrain it. Likewise, nearly all agree that the legislation would do little or nothing to improve quality or change health-care's dysfunctional delivery system...
"Worse, currently proposed federal legislation would undermine any potential for real innovation in insurance and the provision of care. It would do so by overregulating the health-care system in the service of special interests such as insurance companies, hospitals, professional organizations and pharmaceutical companies, rather than the patients who should be our primary concern."