Whenever I read something like this statement in a recent Wall Street Journal article it irritates me:
Republicans would do exactly what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi so memorably predicted would happen once the health-care bill passed: find out what’s inside it. Mr. Boehner says his priority is full repeal. But he also knows he is in for a fight. In this fight, hearings would help Republicans accomplish several things.
First, they would help define the law’s problems for the American people.
Second, by defining the problems, Republicans would be in a better position to define and sell their more market-friendly fixes.
Third, by doing the first two, Republicans might get enough votes here and there to kick out key rungs of ObamaCare.
The emphasis is mine. Doesn’t there need to be a market for “market-friendly fixes” to function?
That’s a key problem. There is no market in either healthcare or health insurance or whatever market exists is so restricted, has so many barriers, and is so convoluted that it’s barely worthy of the name.
The essential problem is that it’s not entirely clear that we want a market in healthcare or that such a thing would be even barely tolerable in terms of public health. Our choices lie in how to maneuver the current oligopoly and oligopsony.
But, but, but,….I thought our problems with health care indicated a failure of the market. Everyone says so. Everyone says the market has failed therefore market solutions can’t work.
Of course, if that isn’t true makes you wonder how they know market solutions wont work. Of course, you’re right we’d need to move health care towards an actual market, but declaring the market a failure when it is clearly a failure of planning and thus government is simply dishonest bullshit.
Nobody but the sick or stupid is justified in participating in any healthcare insurance market, of course.
But there is a market in health care. It’s called “medical tourism” or “dental tourism” and is alive and well in Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Hungary, Czech Republic, India and Thailand.
‘Of course, if that isn’t true makes you wonder how they know market solutions wont work. Of course, you’re right we’d need to move health care towards an actual market”
Interesting that no country with first world levels of care uses a market based system to provide health care. If it is such an obvious solution, it seems like someone would try it.
Steve
There you go again assuming politics and democracies produce rational results. That is a serious error. Try again.