Medicine is not like buying gasoline. If a pill keeps you alive and costs 100 dollars a pill, you will be desperate to pay it. The guy selling it knows you will be desperate to buy it. What is a pill? Processed chemicals, and a person with knowledge to measure and dispense it to you. Money is the barrier that keeps one from having it. Yet making it free does not encourage future development and production of it. Free market vs socialism. How about letting medicine be run by clergy, priests and nuns. These people are willing to do it at a lower cost then non clergy going to school to dispense the same skills. Why? One does it for profit and the other does it as a service. Maybe this is an area that can be left to religious people vs corporation and government.
>Medicine is not like buying gasoline.
Actually, yes it is. People certainly try to rationalize why it is not, but assume you’re in the middle of the desert, and that gasoline is the only way back to civilization, then that gasoline becomes pretty crucial as well now doesn’t it?
Food is pretty crucial. We have plenty of people supplying it, so it doesn’t much seem so hard to get. Assume it was actually scarce. In the face of starvation, medical care becomes comparatively trivial. During a famine getting food shipped out becomes more important than shipping medicine.
How about clean water? We figured that out a long time ago, and thus it is also trivial. Lack clean water though and you get cholera outbreaks, and mass death.
Then someone mentioned how choosing a surgeon was a real difficult choice, and not one to be taken lightly. True enough.
Choosing a brake mechanic is kind of important as well. Somehow I can manage to rely on the market and the courts to make that work.
Surgeons have tricky, high consequence jobs. However there is no magical thing from a command economy which changes that fact. Bureaucrats don’t have to have access to better information than the average consumer. Knowing government employees, they likely won’t care if they do have it. Their life isn’t on the line. The patient’s is. Who do you think cares more? It’s pretty closely related to who spends their money more carefully, someone spending their own money or someone spending other’s money?
People for some reason attach special importance to medicine as if it is the only field in the world which can have life or death consequences. Let’s be honest, it’s not. It’s one of many. However it is one which is constantly rationalized into being handed unto centralized control.
Here’s a really easy example. Which is more dangerous a surgeon who screws up or an airline pilot who screws up? The former kills one person when it happens. The latter can kill hundreds of people. Oddly enough nobody is screaming for nationalized air transport (yes I know air transport isn’t a necessity, but I’m looking at consequences here).