Amerika

Normie broadsheet Time discovers that the free market provides better medical care than the bureaucrat-laden, paperwork-strangled and insurance-regulated healthcare system we have now as a product of seventy years of reforming a previously excellent industry:

In arriving at their price list, Smith and Lantier did an end run around the whole system. They asked their fellow doctors how much compensation was expected per procedure, factored in necessary expenses like surgical equipment and medical implants, then tacked on a 10% to 15% profit margin. Since their surgery center does not employ the army of administrators that is often required to haggle with insurers and follow up on Medicare reimbursements, their overhead is smaller. The whole operation is 41 people. “Finding an average price doesn’t require complicated math,” Smith says. “It’s arithmetic.” Since posting the price list eight years ago, they’ve adjusted it twice, both times to lower rates.

One problem with a free-market, cash-based system of health care is that it promises to work really well for people like Villa, whose companies stand to save money by avoiding traditional hospitals, but less well for others. Without safeguards, it threatens to marginalize the poorest and sickest among us, who could not possibly afford, say, a $19,000 knee replacement without help from an employer, the government or a charity. While Americans tend to accept certain inequities as a reality of capitalism–there are always going to be people who succeed and those who fall behind–we are less comfortable with them when it comes to health care. We don’t like the idea of families going bankrupt after a cancer diagnosis or losing coverage after a parent loses a job. In poll after poll Americans of both political parties say they support provisions ensuring that people with pre-existing conditions can access health care.

This points us toward what Donald Trump should do to repeal and replace Obamacare: repeal it, repeal all the other laws since 1945 or so, and let the free market work toward lowering costs so that people can afford regular healthcare. For disasters like a pre-existing condition, allow them to purchase disability insurance, and set up a pool if need be to pay out through private charity for care of the indigent.

As usual, we are are own worst enemies. The more we try to “fix” healthcare, the worse we make it. The only solution is to go back to a very basic approach and then to introduce special provisions for those rare cases that when mentioned in politics, cause us to “wag the dog” and design a system around catastrophes instead of smooth function.

Tags: healthcare, obamacare