<p>Then how could grocery stores work, amarkov? I have no choice but to eat. Surely my lack of choice about needing to eat means that I’ll starve while grocery stores raise their prices ever higher. The market economy provides both necessities and luxuries by the same processes. The only arguable “special cases” are natural monopolies, things like electric power or sewage systems, where competition in a single area is pretty much impossible. Then we must choose among evils: unregulated monopoly, regulated monopoly, or complete government ownership and administration of the monopoly.</p>
<p>Health care is not one of those natural monopolies, beyond limiting contagions or genuine public health emergencies.</p>
<p>And most medical services are for ailments which are not immediately life-threatening, thus giving patients time to shop around. That’s if we actually had a market-based healthcare system where shopping around was possible. Thanks to labor monopolies via licensing, burdensome regulations making it extremely expensive for new providers to emerge and compete, bizarre insurance regulations seemingly designed to make health insurance a hassle, and a culture that demands routine care be provided by an insurance company (rather than out-of-pocket, relying on insurance only for bank-busting health issues), and about a jillion other little complaints here and there that add up (foreign governments driving up the cost of our own drugs by buying so cheap, government subsidies squeezing costs onto the private healthcare consumer, etc.), we don’t have a market-based healthcare system, yet Democrats seem to act as if we do so they can trash it, and Republicans act as if we do so they can defend it.</p>
<p>A market-based system, the same system that gives us restaurants, grocery stores, cell phones, computers, cars, etc., would work if it was allowed to work. As it is the government tells me (through licensing laws and regulations) who I can hire to provide medical services, what drugs I may buy and from whom, what services I <em>must</em> buy if I want to buy a health insurance plan, where to buy health insurance from, who to buy it from, etc. You know, thanks to the FDA, it takes eight years and two billion dollars to bring a drug to market? And people have the nerve to complain to <em>drug companies</em> about why drugs are so expensive?</p>
<p>Imagine if I broke my arm and wanted to go to a cheap little clinic where instead of a doctor, I saw somebody who took a one-year course in basic broken-bone-fixing. He fixes my arm and gives me some pain killers for less than a hundred bucks. But such a clinic would be illegal. The government insists that for my own protection I must see a fully-trained, fully licensed doctor, not even just a nurse, but a doctor, whose time and labor is much more expensive (and far more qualified than I need for the job). Yes, I’m taking a risk by seeing the clinic guy instead of a doctor, but I’m an adult and I make my own choices. It’s like being forced to buy a Rolls Royce if you want a car. Sorry, consumer, you can’t have that Honda, and we’ll send anybody to jail to tries to sell it to you. For your own good, you must buy a Rolls Royce.</p>
<p>There’s little choice as it is, this so-called reform will rob us of even more of it.</p>