Yes,
Free Markets Would Improve Healthcare Results, John Stossel responds to
critics of his last column. 4/27/16
Last week's column on my lung surgery struck a nerve. Many of you
wished me well. Others said I deserve to die.
"He likes free markets?" sneered one Internet commenter.
"In a truly free market, society wouldn't subsidize the cost of his
smoking. In a truly free market, he'd be dead."
No, I wouldn't be dead. In a real free market, I would pay for my
own care and that care would be cheaper and better because that's what market
competition does.
Also, I've never smoked cigarettes. Some people who don't smoke
get lung cancer, too.
The angriest comments were in the Washington
Post: "Stossel
should ask for his money back and the doctors should put cancer back into his
lungs. That's what happens in a consumer-driven market, right?"
People can get very unhinged when libertarians argue that markets
work better.
"HOW would that work? WHO would pay the nurses and the staff
that keep a hospital running?"?
Who do they think pays now? Government and insurance
companies paying doesn't make care "free." Government has no money of
its own; it takes it from us. Such third-party payments just hide the cost.
"Is John Stossel's life worth more than the guy who collects
my trash? ... Turn health care over to his jackboot crew, only the rich will
live to old age."
But it's the shopping around—including shopping by the rich—that
fuels the innovation and discounting that extends everyone's lives, not just the rich. Charity will
help the very poor.
"Let's see him negotiate the price of chemo vs. surgery when
he's in the ambulance on way to hospital... Medical care is not amenable to
usual market forces."
But it is. Patients wouldn't need to negotiate from the ambulance
because such decisions would have already been made for them by thousands of
previous patients, especially the 2 percent who pay the closest attention. Word
would get around that hospital X is a rip-off but hospital Y gives better
treatment for less. Doctors would advertise prices. Rating agencies would
evaluate them for quality. Everyone will know more.
A hospital worker complained about this "customer mentality.
A hospital is NOT a restaurant. It is not Burger King. You don't get to have it
your way."
Why not? Must we just passively take what we're handed when it
comes to medicine, even though we'd never accept that with hamburgers?
Medical patients tolerate indifferent service the way people
tolerate waiting at the post office. The Postal Service, we were told, can't
possibly make a profit, get it there overnight, etc. Then came UPS and FedEx.
Competition showed what is possible.
"Stossel may think he's getting 'excellent medical
care'," writes Cato Institute health care analyst Michael Cannon.
"But he doesn't know it, and neither do his doctors, because
there is no market system to show how much better it could be. ... In a market
system, competition would push providers to strive to keep patients from
falling through these cracks. ... In our system, there is no such pressure on
providers ... because the real customer is government. As a result, few
patients know how unsafe American medicine is." Cannon warns,
"Without that information, patients—even when they are smart, skeptical
and wealthy like Stossel—are constantly consenting to inferior care."
http://reason.com/archives/2016/04/27/yes-free-markets-would-improve-healthcar
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