Speaking of echoes Michael Barone touches on a point that I made yesterday:
So it would be unwise to copy the New Deal as a recipe for economic recovery. And the policies that produced the wartime boom are not replicable today. We are not going to have rationing, wage and price controls, government spending nearly half the gross domestic product, 91 percent tax rates and a 12-million-man military (the equivalent today would be 27 million).
Hat tip: Glenn Reynolds
I wonder if those who look so nostalgically at the New Deal are really thinking of wage and price controls? Just to refresh your memory, the last time we tried those was under Richard Nixon and, honestly, it didn’t work out too well, sounding the death knell for a number of American industries. Unless they’re planning on import quotas as well.
If a return to Depression Era strategies means a return to a Depression Era standard of living, I think that a lot of Americans won’t be too happy about it.
We are not going to have rationing, wage and price controls, government spending nearly half the gross domestic product….
Um, won’t all of those things happen if the government completely takes over the healthcare industry? There’s no way they can extend healthcare to all the uninsured without rationing, and in order to reign in expense they will have to try and cut expenses. Once they realize that electronic record keeping isn’t going to magically reduce healthcare costs, they will start casting about for another method. And Congress and the Obama Administration have already started instituting wage and price controls in the financial sector, so it’s natural they will do so in the healthcare sector.
Yeah, that occurred to me, too. They can’t get where they purportedly want to go (high quality health care for all) with price controls and rationing, either. That’s why I’ve been harping on the idea of increasing supply here at The Glittering Eye. It’s the only way to achieve the objective.
Aren’t price controls already in place in so many markets, gas for you car, your heating oil, and other utilities. Plane fairs, college education, high school education, the clothes you purchase..why is it that the same medical procedure at one hospital might cost you hundreds if not thousands more at another? We have price controls everywhere already, why not for medical?
From the point of view of the average health care consumer, how would government “rationing” be any different than what they experience now? Health care is apportioned by income now — plenty for the well-off, quite a bit less for the less well-off. More for urban and suburban, less for rural. Long waits for some, no waits for others.
The essential decisions are made not by doctors in many cases, but by private insurers who manage the rationing according to rules we have no control over. It’s free market rationing in terms of its impact on consumers. Why would government rationing necessarily be worse? How is it that the French can do this and we can’t?
I suspect the fact that American doctors make three times what their French colleagues do has something to do with it. Any health care reform plan that will actually reform anything means they’ll take a pay cut which, being human, they’ll resist doing.
Let’s call it a market correction then.
What is a fair salary for a medical doctor to earn..one hundred thousand, 2, one million..compare this debate to the debate on raising the minimum wage, how is it we find it difficult to cap a doctors salary but have no problem capping the wages of the poor…?
how is it we find it difficult to cap a doctors salary but have no problem capping the wages of the poor…?
A minimum wage is a MINIMUM, more like shoes than a CAP, which is the top.
means they’ll take a paycheck which, being human, they’ll resist doing.
I’ll take a paycheck any time. It’s a pay cut that is problematic.
Thanks. I’d intended to type “pay cut”. I’ve emended the comment.
Well, I was confused at first, because it seems like many doctors are willing to take the paycheck from the government. We don’t know if it’s a pay cut what with even private insurance companies having their “in-network” doctors reimbursed at something lower than the “sticker price”. It’s very hard to determine what the sticker price is and what the real price is.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics has information about physicians’ incomes and physicians here are paid three times what their corresponding numbers’ are in France, Germany, or the UK.