From: Mises Daily
Sent: Friday, October 02, 2009 7:35 AM
Subject: A Free-Market Guide to Fixing Healthcare

Understanding the Costs of Healthcare by D.W. MacKenzie

Will increased government involvement in the healthcare industry cause more or less corporate lobbying? Both mandated-private and single-payer, nonprofit insurance proposals will likely increase wasteful lobbying. read more.

A Free-Market Guide to Fixing Healthcare

Mises Daily by Mises.org

Posted on 10/2/2009

It’s a near-universal assumption of the healthcare debate that the current system is a market system and it is broken, and hence we should try a government system. The people who assume this aren’t considering the last 100 years of healthcare policy. Government is deeply involved at all levels, from medical licensure and
patents, to direct subsidies and provision, to employee mandates and insurance-pooling controls, at all levels.

It’s been a steady path to medical serfdom all the way, under both parties, and this is precisely what accounts for most of the problems that people complain about. Meanwhile, the private dimensions of the healthcare system is what accounts for its merits.

So what are we doing? The very opposite of what we should be doing: more control instead of more freedom, more spending instead of less, more mandates instead of fewer. The logic of interventionism is taking over:
problems are being addressed by more of what caused the problems. The sick patient is being given more poison with the claim that it is the cure.

We’ve put together this healthcare reader as a means of providing a deeper understanding of cause and effect. This market is like all other sectors of society: it functions best under conditions of freedom rather than state control.

Dailies:

1. “Understanding the Costs of Healthcare” by D.W. MacKenzie
2. “Is Emergency Care a Failed Market?” by Eric M. Staib
3. “What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us” by Yuri N. Maltsev
4. “A Four-Step Healthcare Solution” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Also in MP3)
5. ” Universal Coverage Means Suppressing Human Choice” by Eric M. Staib
6. “Socialized Healthcare vs. The Laws of Economics” by Thomas J. DiLorenzo
7. “Why Obamacare Can’t Work: The Calculation Argument” by Gabriel E. Vidal
8. ” Private-Sector Health Care Leads the Way” by Chris Brown
9. “The Relentless Process of Socializing Health Care” by D.W. MacKenzie (Also in MP3)
10. “How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care” by Henry Jones
11. “Health Care for All!” by Christopher Mayer
12. “Health Care Interventionism: A Case Study” by Christopher Westley
13. “Bad Medicine” or Bad Economics?” by William L. Anderson

Journals:

1. “Socialized Medicine, Take Two” by Jeffrey Herbener, The Free Market
2. “Socialized Medicine in America” by Timothy D. Terrell, The Free Market
3. Two Book Reviews by Dale Steinreich, Drury University, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 75-85 (PDF)
   1. Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around The World. By John C. Goodman, Gerald L. Musgrave, Devon M. Herrick Lanham. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.
   2. Miracle Cure: How to Solve America’s Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn’t the Answer. By Sally C. Pipes. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 2004.

Media:

1. “Health Economics” by Walter Block, Mises University, July 31, 2009 (MP3)
2. “Economics of Risk and Insurance: From Healthcare to Welfare” by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mises University, July 29, 2009 (MP3)
3. Mises Blog: “Health care: the government is the problem” (Video)