The current crisis with our hospital system has nothing to do with private business doing what it does best, it is all a result of government interference and cost escalating insurance programs.

Fallacy Number One:

The first image is that held by the delusional left. They imagine that if most health care were publicly provided and administered by the state, people of all social classes, age groups, and races and sexes, would have equal access. . . .

Mostly the left-wing view is of the negative sort. It makes them crazy, and offends their moral sense, that the rich can afford better health care than the poor. They believe that it violates a sense of fairness that the rich have the means to live longer, healthier lives, than the poor, who are left to the mercy of life’s exigencies.

But let’s say that we can show that under a capitalist health market, the poor will be better off in absolute terms. I doubt very seriously that this will satisfy the true socialist. What bothers him is not so much bad health as the unequal access to good health.

Fallacy Number Two:

The second view of socialized medicine sees the problems with socialism, that it leads to building up a state apparatus that has life-and-death control over the population. Because bureaucrats have no strong incentive to see to the wellbeing of people, they make decisions based on politics.

The Republicans have done much damage to our health care system with regulations and politics.  The rejuvenation of the Democratic party nationally will like subject us to more calls for socialized medicine.

To watch the flow of history is to observe two great streams of activity. In the private sector, we find innovation, efficiency, cost cutting, human service, dynamism, and problem solving. In the public sector we find stagnation, bureaucracy, inefficiency, cost overruns, human coercion, and problem creating. If the government alone had been in charge for the last 500 years, our world would look very different. Indeed, we might have no civilization to speak of. But fortunately the market – meaning innovating and cooperating human beings – seems to find a way around the problems that government has created.

This is nowhere more true than in the medical sector. It is thanks to the market that there is more medical information available today than ever before in history, more life-saving techniques, more access to services, and more choice. Ideally, we would have radical reform so that government programs would be abolished, medical cartels smashed, and medical service provision wholly privatized.

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