Free Markets Really Is the Answer

Rush interacts with David Gratzer's article on Real Clear Markets. Read article here. The answer to our medical costs is right in front of our noses if only we will abandon the mentality that our neighbors should pay for it. Free Markets really are the answer.

I went back, we have a story from Real Clear Markets, their website from February 26th of 2010, a little over a year ago.  One of the solutions that I, a relative nobody, I'm not a health care expert, all I know is how to get sick and how to get well; other than that, I don't know much -- but one thing I've always understood in explaining the problem with the health care system is that the costs have no relationship whatsoever to the customer or the patient's ability to pay, and that anywhere else in our system that would spell doom.  For example, if hotel rooms were priced with no regard for what people could pay, there would be no hotel business.  Automobiles, whatever it is.  Food.  And yet over here, standing alone by itself is this industry we call health care, and over there the prices have nothing to do whatsoever with the simple sustaining element of private sector free markets, and that's the profit motive.  The profit motive doesn't exist.  

The profit motive, by that I mean you price a service, or a product, whatever, in such a way that you earn money in the end, you earn a profit while people who buy it benefit profoundly from it.  If that doesn't happen your service or your product don't survive.  And the market rules.  But nobody in their right mind would design a product and bring it to market without one shred of concern over whether or not prospective customers could afford it.  Yet in health care, whether or not somebody can afford it is irrelevant.  It doesn't matter.  

It's a big bugaboo of mine.  I've always said the cure to this problem, the solution to spiraling out of control health care costs lies in health savings accounts, vouchers, what have you.  You put the patient, the customer back in charge with what he's getting, you make the patient or the customer, whatever, have to pay and let him shop like happens for any other product, and the competition, even in health care, will see to it that prices are met with the ability of everybody involved to pay and everybody involved being able to earn a profit in a normal, everyday -- the catastrophic's a whole different thing.  You do need a separate system to handle catastrophic circumstances, just as you would need a special circumstance to handle people who want to buy $500,000 cars.  But it's such a unique and rare thing, you wouldn't have a major primary system built around that circumstance.  But health care is.  

Health care is built around the fact nobody can afford it.  So it has no prayer.  And that's why you see these stories, the main idea for getting quality health at less cost in jeopardy because providers called the regime's blueprint so complex it's unworkable?  Well, if the key medical providers had to price their service in such a way that people could afford it, you'd have a whole different circumstance.  Imagine if we needed hotel insurance, for example, or pick any other product.  You need the government coming in or somebody essentially buying it for you.  That business would not last long.  Health care does, for one reason, 'cause it represents the best single opportunity for Marxists and socialists to control people's lives, and any other issue out there.