When did our health care costs begin to spiral out of control? The answer, according to Duke Professor John David Lewis, is when government began calling health care a “right” and started egalitarian projects like Medicare and Medicaid in the 1960s. These government interventions created economic distortions that only get worse – and the Obama/Pelosi prescription is for more of the same. Via Real Clear Politics:
Historically, the huge rise in health care costs began in the 1960s with the Great Society programs, especially Medicare. Fiscally, that program is approaching insolvency. To create an even greater labyrinth of bureaucracy now — in new programs that, after juggling the figures, advocates are proud to say will cost less than a thousand billion dollars over 10 years — is to add to the very cause that led to the rising costs and to invite a monumental financial crisis in the next decade. Economically, this is hard to dispute.
But such economic arguments have not stopped the train to further government intervention, and we should ask why.
The answer is that the advocates of government medicine are upholding health care as a moral right. Desiring to mandate this “right” by legislative fiat, they have been unwilling to face the cause and effect relationship between increasing government actions and rising prices. That is because the moral goal of equality, measured against the claims to a right to health care, has trumped the mere economic arguments.
As a result, calls for more and wider programs — to enforce the “right” — have continued, even as prices rise. This has led to even greater price distortions, which have fueled calls for more interventions, leading to higher prices and demands for more programs.
This vicious cycle is blinding people to the fact that the fundamental cause of the problem is the government interventions, which have caused the distortions.
Again, even a cursory look at the evidence shows the cost problem beginning in the late 1960s, when the government began its massive increase in programs designed to make us all equal by legislative decree. And if one thinks that England today is a model for what a country should do, one may not know the reality of six-bed wards in National Health Service hospitals, of patients waiting over a year for heart operations or of refrigerated trucks in hospital parking lots to store bodies from the flu season (all of which I saw when living there).
But in order to fix the health care market, we must rid ourselves of the basic premises that drive the debate:
Those who want to see an end to spiraling medical costs should challenge the premises behind the government interventions.
The first premise is moral: that medical care is a right. It is not. There was no right to such care before doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies produced it. Health care is a service, which we all need, and none of us are better served by placing our lives and our doctors under coercive bureaucratic control.
The second premise is economic: that the government can produce a positive result by redistributing thousands of billions of dollars from its most productive citizens. This is the road to stagnation and national bankruptcy, not universal prosperity.
Read it all.
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