Obamacare? Trumpcare? Get Rid Of It All
by Chris Rossini via The Mises Institute,
ZeroHedge.com
May 6, 2017
Ever since the US government began to sink its claws into the medical industry a good 50 or so years ago, attempts at reducing costs have failed again and again. This is par for the course whenever government invades an industry.
Trying to reform this Frankenstein with either Obamacare, or Trumpcare, will solve nothing.
The problem is structural. Tinkering with this or that will just waste more time.
In order for real change to happen, a fundamental change has to occur in the thinking about what health care actually is. It’s not what Americans have been conditioned to believe.
From a fundamental economics point of view, what is healthcare exactly? One of the things that’s particularly frustrating for me as an economist is this notion that “healthcare” is some kind of a unique good or service, that everybody needs, everybody wants, but cannot be provided by the market the way the market provides shoes, or tomatoes, or automobiles, or any other good.
But what is healthcare?
Nobody consumes “healthcare”. No one has a right to “healthcare,” because healthcare is not a homogeneous thing.
There’s no such thing as one unit of healthcare.
Rather what we mean by healthcare is a discreet set of specific commodities, goods and services, that you can buy in combinations, or different quality levels.
So open heart surgery is a service you can purchase on the market that contributes to your health. But so is taking an aspirin.
In other words, there’s no such thing as “healthcare.” There’s a heterogenous bundle of goods and services that different individuals will want to consume at different levels.
The Rest…HERE
