Ron Paul: Problem With Healthcare is Too Much Government
Ron Paul’s op-ed explaining what the root problems of America’s healthcare crisis actually are, via The Advertiser.com (New Orleans):
Today, the Supreme Court is expected to issue its long-awaited decision regarding the constitutionality of the “Obamacare” law. I recently discussed absurd legal arguments by Obamacare advocates that Congress can compel the purchase of health insurance, and the dismal record of federal courts applying so-called “judicial review” in protecting liberty. It is obvious that Obamacare’s legal apologists either are wholly ignorant of constitutional principles, or wholly lawless in their blatant disregard for those principles.
Likewise, supporters of Obamacare are willfully ignorant of basic economics. The fundamental problem with health care costs in America is that the doctor-patient relationship has been profoundly altered by third-party interference. Third parties, either government agencies themselves or nominally private insurance companies virtually forced upon us by government policies, have not only destroyed doctor-patient confidentiality. They also inescapably drive up costs because basic market disciplines — supply and demand, price sensitivity, and profit signals — are destroyed.
Obamacare, via its insurance mandate, is more of the same misdiagnosis.
Gabriel Vidal, chief operating officer of a U.S. hospital system, sees this problem squarely in his daily work. As he explains, Obamacare will only make matters worse because it fails to recognize that “costs are out of control because they do not reflect prices created by the voluntary exchange between patients and providers”» like every well-functioning industry.”
Instead, “health costs reflect the distortions that government regulators have introduced through reimbursement mechanisms created by command-and-control bureaucracies at federal and state levels,” he continues. “But it is theoretically and practically impossible for a bureaucrat — no matter how accurate the cost data, how well-intentioned and how sophisticated his computer program — to come up with the correct and just price. The (doctor-patient) relationship” has been corrupted by the intrusion of government and its intermediaries (HMOs, for example) to such an extent that we can no longer speak of a relationship that can produce meaningful pricing information…”
Absent such pricing information, our system increasingly resembles socialist systems with centralized price setting, shortages, rationing, apathy, and declining quality of care…
The problem is acute and worsening. Obamacare’s third party insurance mandate is only the first step toward what the political left really wants: a single payer government healthcare system.
Meanwhile, conservatives seem resigned to a third party insurance system and therefore fail to present a viable alternative to the American people. They continue to speak in terms of saving the health care “system,” when in fact what America needs is a rejection of all government systems in favor of free market mechanisms…
