I recently stumbled across an article by a doctor who declared:
I am a capitalist and physician who believes competition within a market can drive up quality and drive down cost. That’s why I believe single-payer Medicare for All is an improved market solution and the best road forward for American health care.
The essence of the free market is freedom of choice–the freedom to create and trade values. But a single-payer system, whether it is called Medicare for All or something else, eliminates choice. Anyone who claims that a single-payer system is a “market solution” has, by that very fact, proclaimed that he has abandoned principles.
In the article, the doctor laments dealing with insurance companies. He wants to eliminate the insurance companies and replace them with the government. He wants to replace the freedom to choose with government mandates and dictates.
If you don’t like your insurance company, you have other options. When the insurance companies are exterminated you won’t have other options. Eliminating choices isn’t a market solution; it’s a statist “solution.” And statist solutions never deliver on their promises. They only deliver suffering, misery, and broken promises.
Consider the promises made by the advocates of government schools. For decades they have presented us with an endless parade of schemes to improve education, with each scheme failing to deliver. And so, the educational bureaucrats devise another scheme, promising that if taxpayers pour more money into government schools, this time they will deliver. And they fail again and again.
The same thing will happen with Medicare for All. But those who are devoid of principles can’t see this.
When choice is eliminated–when government is the sole (or dominant) provider of a service–innovators do not have the freedom to develop and offer new values. This was true during the seventy years that the government prohibited competition in the telephone industry and gave AT&T a monopoly. It is true today in health care and education.
When the government finally recognized the freedom of individuals to innovate in telecommunications, the world changed. From land lines and telephones that couldn’t be owned, we progressed to smart phones that allow us to take photos, email, surf the Internet, and much more. Steve Jobs could not have produced and sold the iPhone under the AT&T monopoly. But because he was relatively free to produce and trade values, Jobs was able to change the world.
If we truly want affordable health care for all, then we must free the innovators. Somewhere in the world there is an individual (or maybe many of them) who could be the Steve Jobs for health care (and education). We need to recognize and protect his freedom to create and trade values. We can’t envision what he will do, but we will be amazed by it. Just as we were amazed at the values that Steve Jobs created and offered to the world.