Through economic hiccups, downturns, and catastrophes there is always one billboard that infuriates me to see is still up: medical assistants. Do I hold any special ire for these well-meaing individuals?
In spite of my misanthropic tendencies, no, I don’t.
It infuriates me because the money I spend, that you spend, that anyone spends on healthcare isn’t paying for medical expertise, nor even for those spiffy toys that hum and whir as they determine by abstruse mechanical thaumaturgy what ails you.
Your monies are going to some assistant moiling through mounds of dead trees, which will be sent enclosed in more dead trees to another assistant in a dreadful office cubicle, and from there they will disappear into the nebulous disaster of a faceless, joyless, money-grubbing corporation.
What is the solution to this catastrophe? Many on the Hill would like you to think that the answer lies in more legislation and more regulation. I will side with Lao Tzu, and say that is a terrible idea.
What’s ruining healthcare is regulation and litigation. There are mountains and mountains of paperwork to be done, by government mandate or out of fear of law suits. It causes insurance companies to go out of business, creates barriers to entry in the insurance market that preclude new competitors, and thus makes everything more expensive.
What we need is not more government, more regulation, and more paperwork, what we need is tort reform, industry deregulation, and a return to traditional medical practice, where the patient was part of the process, instead of a piece of meat on an operating table, whose fate hangs on the pen of a bureaucrat.
Competition in the healthcare industry will resume if the market is allowed to function, and with competition will come decreases in prices.
Economists are in agreement that free markets are better than government control. The failure of communism has proven this.
The other extreme is individualism and personal liberty, which are exactly the values that have allowed America to realize unprecedented wealth and comfort. And if you continue to doubt my assertions, consider the following: “Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls.”
Medicine shouldn’t be getting more expensive, it should be getting less expensive. Every system in which the market is allowed to rule eventually tends to become cheaper. Two hundred years ago in this nation, most of your time was spent scrounging enough to stay alive. A hundred years ago, a lot of your time was spent thus.
And today, you can get by working almost not at all (especially if you have a government job, hint hint more government is bad). Your money spent on healthcare isn’t going to your doctor, or even the pharmaceutical companies, it’s going to some faceless middle man, ambulance chaser, malpractice attorney, government bureaucrat, or any one of the myriad professions that are propped up by an overregulated, bloated healthcare industry.
Government sucks at doing what private industry can do. Government is usually only brought in to deal with industries that have been so overregulated that the market has ceased to work, like a wild animal tied up by so much red tape that it can’t survive without your help. The answer is not to add more red tape, it is to set it free. Healthcare is a classic example of this.
Let people make their own choices, instead of having someone else make them for them. How did healthcare operate for so many years before all this red tape? It operated on the assumption that the populace could make its own decisions without having their options curtailed by government or litigation. It operated on the assumption that people can be responsible for their own actions.
Some of you will say it’s the only way forward, and we can’t go back to no regulations and reduced litigations because it’s too hard.
Personally, I am willing to settle for mediocrity in the mundanities of life. But I refuse to accept anything less than honesty, respect, and justice from my government. Anything less than that is tyranny.
Time and again, government management of public interests has been mediocre and tyrannical, at best, so don’t expect the enlightened, socialist utopia the politicans are spinning from their marble halls on the Hill.
Instead, tell them you want healthcare where you make the calls, where the decisions aren’t made by corrupt lawyers or politicians at the beck and call of lobbyists, but by you.
