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To: Prokopton

No, it’s called the free market.


8 posted on 12/09/2011 7:24:15 PM PST by ez ("Abashed the Devil stood and felt how awful goodness is." - Milton, "Paradise Lost")
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To: ez
No, it’s called the free market.

You posted:

"force doctors and hospitals to accept what people could afford to pay."

That is not the "free market". "Forcing" anyone to accept "what people could afford to pay" is Socialism if not Fascism.

If you can't afford to pay what I charge for my goods or services, you don't get them. I can't be "forced" to accept what you can afford, that would be involuntary servitude.

36 posted on 12/09/2011 8:07:12 PM PST by Prokopton (.)
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To: ez

Actually, there is a portion of the Obamacare bill that would become a pro-market reform (not of health care, but of health insurance) once it is shorn of the individual mandate and of the powers given the Secretary of HHS to micromange every detail of what a “qualifying plan” would be: the establishment of health insurance exchanges by each of the several states. I suspect that and the popular “slacker provision” that lets under 26ers stay on their parents plan would be about all that would survive.

The problem with a strict free-market reform of health care is that health care is, for reasons of quality control, actually provided by a government granted monopoly-guild: the physicians. Only licensed physicians can practice medicine — as it should be for reasons of quality control, but this means that prices for medical services, for which demand is quite inelastic, include a large share of monopoly rents. (Of course physicians suffer the predations of another state-created guild: the bar! Tort reform would go a good way toward containing medical costs.)

Most medical innovations are also sold by actual corporate monopolies, as they are patented. And, however much some FReepers may have bought into the delusion that a patent represents “property rights”, a patent is a state grant of a monopoly, period. (I regard the first modern patent law, the Statue of Monopolies of 1624 to have been the last good patent law, the plainly the one the Founders had in mind along with the Law of Queen Anne in granting Congress the power to grant copyrights and patents.)

I would be curious how you propose to create a free market in health care. Shall we abolish patents on medical advances? Let amateur physicians put out shingles? (Actually, I understand that in Iceland anyone can practice medicine so long as they market themselves as a “quack”, rather than a physician, or at least it used to be so.) Give tax breaks to anyone who will open a new med school? (Oh, wait, that’s government intervention, too. . .)


38 posted on 12/09/2011 8:14:21 PM PST by The_Reader_David (And when they behead your own people in the wars which are to come, then you will know. . .)
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To: ez

“...force doctors and hospitals to accept what people could afford to pay.”

Forcing anyone to do anything is not the “free market.”


84 posted on 12/10/2011 12:51:14 AM PST by dixiechick2000 (Proud barbarian TEA Party SOB and, apparently, an evil Capitalist.)
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To: ez

A choice not an echo! Either Santorum or Bachmann.


139 posted on 12/10/2011 8:59:02 AM PST by malos (Call Me Inpressed)
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