ALG Editor’s Note: In the following featured commentary, Senior Commentary Editor Justin Williams is featured in the BigBugNews.
Commentary – Proposed health plan: costs limit care
By Justin Williams
Trade offs are a part of every economic decision whether someone is going to the grocery store or deciding on health care treatments. The lack of a trade-off mechanism in the past has caused health care costs to soar.
Now it’s time to seriously consider what will happen when the decision is taken away from patients and put in the hands of an already heavily debt-burdened, bankrupt government.
In a market, the private ownership of the medicine, tests, and services is supposed to allow exchange and trade on the basis of supply and demand. Now, with the current Obama Administration to eliminate private ownership as the means of production, the patients will simply have no choice but to be entirely subservient to a rationing or “control” board that places government demands above personal needs.
Economically, there is no other way to organize the system than through rationing when the mechanism of prices is abolished altogether.
Even leftist Eugene Robinson at the Washington Post correctly writes “It is not illogical for skeptics to suspect that if millions of people are going to be newly covered by health insurances, either costs are going to skyrocket or services are going to be curtailed.”
In most government programs, the American taxpayer is unlucky enough to get both. Americans have already seen with the lack of a price system that costs have skyrocketed in the medical community, just as they have in the postal service, AMTRAK, the education system and every other arena where the government hegemony has wreaked havoc. Now, instead of allowing a fair price system, the Obama Administration plans on curtailing services… continue read here.
