Chris Ladd ― There Is Never A 'Free Market' In Health Care

“Where it is impossible to create the conditions necessary to make competition effective, we should resort to other methods of guiding economic activity.”

-Friedrich Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, p.37

(Forbes) — Republicans still struggle to promote a credible ownership culture largely because they refuse to wrestle honestly with the hard cases; the situations in which market forces fail to allocate value effectively. Medical care is probably the most frustrating example since it stubbornly resists market solutions and affects everyone deeply.

Health care is not a market. It lacks any of the vital features of a market. Treating health care like a market means living and dying without modern medicine. To advance a culture based on opportunity rather than government dependence, we need an alternative to state-owned health care that keeps key decisions in personal hands, preserves market triggers where appropriate, and rids us of the strangling influence of the massive federal bureaucracy. Republicans cannot do this without abandoning some cherished fantasies about the unquestionable, divinely-ordained righteousness of markets.

Read more: https://www.forbes.com/sites/chrisladd/2017/03/07/there-is-never-a-free-market-in-health-care/#596bf9bf1147