Yesterday, while watching the whole-lot-o-nothing of the GOP attempt to … do whatever with healthcare, several things occurred to me. First, these people are pathetic idiots. Second, they, largely, have no concept of good health or medical needs. Then I concluded, again, that their slow, torturous legal wrangling isn’t concerned with keeping anyone healthy at all; it’s a bail out or subsidy program for the insurance cartel industry and the corporate medical cabal professions.
Hans-Hermann Hoppe must have had similar thoughts lately. He posted a proposed solution to the dread problems of healthcare in America for Mises (here, via LRC); it’s an essay of sorts from 1993 and The Free Market. Yes, it’s all free market based – real freedom in the really free markets.
It’s true that the US health-care system is a mess, but this demonstrates not market but government failure. To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination of all existing government controls.
It’s time to get serious about health-care reform. Tax credits, vouchers, and privatization will go a long way toward decentralizing the system and removing unnecessary burdens from business. But four additional steps must also be taken:
Only these four steps, although drastic, will restore a fully free market in medical provision. Until they are adopted, the industry will have serious problems, and so will we, its consumers.
Here’s a summary of his four points:
1. Kill the licensing racket. It does nothing except add layers of complexity and expense.
2. Free the market for procedures, drugs, and devices. No more FDA.
3. Completely deregulate the health-insurance business. Allow the invisible hand to operate efficiently.
4. Eliminate Medicare and Medicaid. You subsidize what you want more of; pay for more sickness, get more sickness. And more, waste, expense, fraud, etc.
These are pure Austrian principles. They are not that radical. The implementation would represent a return to the traditional American way of healthcare, departed not so very long ago – the days when a hospital stay cost hundreds, not tens of thousands of dollars. It would mean addressing the root problems rather than a band-aid for the superficial surface. It means common sense.
Ferre Bee Keeper.
Those are the reasons it would work – just as it did for most of American history (150-ish years) and almost all of human history (10,000 years, maybe). These are also the same reasons why the Congress and the industry will not go along. They don’t want to fix problems, especially problems of their own making. That would rather point out their useless, evil existence.
So, it’s not going to happen – any time soon or in the remains of the USA. Just know that the solutions are available.
A new poll indicates Americans, of all political stripes have very low levels of trust in the medical industry, government, and most major institutions. I’m planning to cover that, in-depth, a little later today.
PERRIN LOVETT 
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