The Case for Free-Market Healthcare

The US has a mostly socialist healthcare system.Show more

Our government accounts for over 65% of U.S. healthcare spending and the 35% that is private is highly distorted by regulations. Here are some of those regulations…

Employer-based health insurance mandate for companies with over 50 full-time employees and tax penalties for individuals who try to self-insure. But our healthcare shouldn’t be dependent upon and decided by our employer.

Medical licenses. I’m a strong supporter of credentialing, but they shouldn’t be required by law to practice medicine. There’s always a chance one gets an incompetent doctor, but consumer empowerment via reviews, reports, ratings, and when appropriate lawsuits is better at mitigating risk than limiting the number of people who can enter the field, ostensibly to protect the consumer, but in reality to protect the seller. America has the highest-paid doctors in the world because the American Medical Association has successfully mandated a doctor shortage. So much for the Hippocratic oath, huh?

The average cost of a medical malpractice claim has increased by more than 50% since 2009, but the true cost isn’t so much in the claims themselves, but in what’s called “defensive medicine” whereby doctors will over-test-and-over-treat to avoid any potential lawsuit. We need to reduce malpractice claims, which can be done via tort reform and patients’ compensation.

Certificate-of-Need: New hospitals are prohibited from opening without the approval of existing hospitals. This has made the hospital industry into a cartel with hospital spending now over a third of overall healthcare spending.

Customers are prohibited from buying health insurance across state lines.

Customers are prohibited from buying prescription drugs from overseas.

The FDA doesn’t trust individuals to do their own cost-benefit analysis so they prohibit medical products from entering the market until they give their approval. Big Pharma has successfully lobbied to increase the average cost of drug approval to $3 billion and to a 10-year wait time. The FDA may sound good in theory, but its politicization of medicine has led to more corruption and its general risk-aversion has cost untold lives while at the same time the FDA gives people a false sense of confidence when its track record hasn’t been great.

With 20-year patents, drug companies are incentivized to spend a lot of money filing and enforcing them. Patents should be abolished or at least cut down to 4 years because ultimately what drives innovation isn’t temporary monopoly control over a product, but by innovating so fast that the competition can’t keep up because they haven’t mastered the fundamentals. In other words, the most successful drug companies shouldn’t be the ones that own the rights to the best drugs, but that constantly innovate better ones. For example, Elon Musk has gone so far as to open-source Tesla despite their enormous research costs because he knows copycats make for weak tigers.

NIH grants saddle medical researchers in bureaucratic paperwork and pulls their focus away from researching treatments that the market actually wants to fund. We should abolish the NIH, or at least reform federal funding where it would only be provided after-the-fact for achieving clearly defined national goals in high need areas like cancer, heart disease, and longevity. It shouldn’t be spent on studying coca*ne's effect on the s*xual habits of Quail.

States’ are forced to comply with federal micromanagement of Medicaid in order to receive matching federal funds. These top-down requirements diminish states’ rights and force the poor into an inadequate, insolvent system.

Therefore is the solution to our broken healthcare system to give even more control over our bodies to a corrupt incompetent federal body?

Authoritarians think the answer is yes because “healthcare is a human right!” They only differ on whether they want a government option or a government monopoly in health insurance and/or treatment.

They believe our federal government will be able to increase access, affordability, and quality.

They point to international metrics such as infant mortality, which countries calculate differently, lifespans, which Americans choose to drive, eat, drink, and kill more often, and healthcare costs, which can only be so high due to its socialist aspects and where if we compare the true cost of government health insurance to private health insurance by factoring in the cost of tax collection, which deceitful studies tend to leave out, then they’re actually about the same, but nonetheless pointing to government-created problems to justify greater government control has always worked on the government “educated.”

Read FULL essay at https://www.anthonygalli.com/