The US Needs Free Market Reforms
The current problems in American health care have been caused by decades of government interference in the free markets for health care and health insurance. The problems of rising costs, long waits, and unhappy patients and providers are more reminiscent of the long bread lines in the former USSR, not of capitalist systems.
In contrast, note that in the most free (i.e., least regulated) sectors of American medicine, such as LASIK eye surgery, we see the classic pattern of falling costs and increasing quality that we take for granted with free market economics. And this is precisely because such procedures and services are not regarded as "rights" that must be somehow guaranteed by the government.
Free market reforms, such as eliminating onerous guaranteed-issue insurance laws, eliminating mandated benefits, allowing patients to purchase Health Savings Accounts for routine expenses, and allowing patients to purchase catastrophic-only insurance policies across state lines could reduce costs over 50%, making health insurance available to millions who cannot currently afford it.
Rather than imposing more government restrictions on the market (more of the same that caused the problem in the first place), we should loosen those restrictions and allow the free market to work in health care, just as it's worked with computers and cell phones.
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This argument is nonsensical. The U.S. health insurance market bears little resemblance to the LASIK eye surgery market, and even less resemblance to the cell phone market that the FIRM writer mentions at the end.
LASIK eye surgery is an elective procedure, not unlike cosmetic surgery, and so applying the argument that it benefits from the lack of "mandated benefits" in socialized medicine is a farce. If LASIK eye surgery cost $1000 a decade ago, and now because of market forces the cost is down to say $200, that's fine. No one has to get LASIK eye surgery, and providers are bringing down the cost to convince people it's worth it to shell out X amount of dollars on a procedure that's just elective for them. But that doesn't mean that the same thing would occur in medical cases where patients need to have certain treatment, such as in cancer or a heart attack. In those cases, the patient has few choices, and after all it's choice that's at the heart of market competition. The FIRM writer compares our system to other, more socialized health systems. But truly, our system is still the most free market oriented of just about any industrialized country on the planet, and that has not managed to bring down costs when patients need treatment for cancer or a heart attack.
Instead of looking at health insurance as a classic capitalist commodity like cell phones , which it's not, the FIRM writer and conservatives would be well served to think about "adverse selection," the principal identified by economists that shows how our private health insurance system is fundamentally flawed. Because of "adverse selection" insurance companies favor patients who are healthy over patients who are chronically sick, with the result that the chronically sick get dropped from insurance coverage and can no longer be part of a broad pool of insured Americans , where health risks are spread out equally among sick and poor. It's complicated stuff, but no one is served when commentators oversimplify this issue by describing health coverage as the same as buying a cell phone, when there are different market forces at work.
This pretty well sums up the case against the claim that the healthcare "crisis" is the result of raw capitalism; clearly as mentioned in this argument from FIRM. As with LASIK competition seems like the only real way to drive down costs.