My article of June 11 received a tremendous response and letters continue to come in. Mises.org and many other readers passed along and requested a response to an article appearing in Barron’s on June 14 dealing with the same topic but from an opposing view. Other than satisfying reader requests, the other reason for what follows is that the Mises Institute stands almost completely alone in its support of true health freedom, but what that entails deserves more coverage and exposition. (In contrast, the Cato Institute has thrown its support to reforms such as “decentralized Medicaid” and vouchers.) [Full article]
Source link: http://archive.mises.org/2412/real-medical-freedom/
Real Medical Freedom
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Few people realize that Ontario’s Health Insurance Plan covers doctors far more than other professions. The effect is that doctors alone can earn massive incomes whilst effectively charging 0 to their clients. The obvious result is alternative practice will shrivel up whilst general practice suckles on taxed plunder.
You know what I’d love to see done for the Medical industry. Take a quick look at this.
Resellers Rating
The AMA would probably blow a gasket. That needs to be done on every industry. I have never seen or heard of any better way to regulate an industry than that.
The BBB filters all information out and basically only gives you their own brief summary of the company!!!. What claimants the BBB takes are also delayed and you really don’t know what they are or what happen, and BBB isn’t as easy to use.
The argument that increasing the number of doctors will increase the costs of health care and dilute the quality of care is not entirely without empirical basis, if the recent experience of the legal profession is any guide. Beginning in the 1970s, law schools became the cash cows of the university systems in the United States. The resulting oversupply has had several noticeable effects:
1. The proliferation of specialties that didn’t exist 30 years ago (e.g., “health care law”).
2. The creation of causes of action that previously were unknown (e.g., “toxic torts”).
3. The transformation of the judicial system into not just a bureaucracy, but a constituency that guards and advances its own prerogatives.
4. The creation of a supporting army of “experts,” academics, and allied personnel.
5. The dilution of professionalism as “lawyering” reduces to formerly clerical tasks, such as processing insurance or Social Security claims.
Since someone has to pay for these phenomena, the law practice has devolved into a Robin Hood philosophy on the plaintiffs’ side and a circle the wagons philosophy on the other. The result is an invisible “lawyering tax” on every citizen as businesses and governments pass these costs on to the end user or taxpayer.
In other words, the proliferation of lawyers has created an artificial demand for services, paid for by redistributing public and private wealth. Market forces ultimately will correct the excesses, but the experience suggests that producing more doctors temporarily may well create an artificial demand for their services while diluting professional standards.
Although the medical profession does not have the supply side ability to fund such demand by reallocating wealth, it has the demand side advantage that most of us will more readily seek out available medical treatment than see a lawyer.
Lawyers present a unique problem: Because of the nature of their profession, they can create their own demand. In a world without lawyers, if you slip on the ice in front of a store and break your leg, you go to the doctor and get it fixed, and that’s the end of it. But then an ambulance chaser stops by, and suddenly not only do you need a lawyer, but the store owner does, too. The medical analogy to this would be half of the doctors broke legs and the other half fixed them.
Brandon,
Perhaps lawyers not altogether unique in this respect. Consider the proliferation of mental and physical disorders in recent years. What’s more, if you take into account the medical consequences of many of the treatments in allopathic medicine, it is clear that doctors are in effect creating additional demand for their services.
The rise of litigation is the result of the corruption of the legal system.
In this matter it is no longer rational or based on facts.
If judges refused to allow frivolous law suits or suits that are ridiculous to begin with [spilling hot coffee], then it would end.
In an environment of welfare statism and special interest groups do not expect the legal system to remain above the fray.
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