Health Care
Proposal 3
Government regulation is not the sole cause of current healthcare problems. There are others which the Libertarian Party must address if we are to be credible on the issue.
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Posted March 14, 2006
Issues: A free market no longer exists in healthcare, if it ever did. Hospitals, doctors and pharmaceutical companies enjoy effective monopoly, knowing that their patients must either accept their services at outrageous prices or die. Government regulations serve to protect this system while blocking alternative healthcare solutions. The current system presumes that no one may secure healthcare without insurance, thereby giving insurance companies a captive market to gouge without mercy. It is this combination of factors which has left over a third of Americans unable to purchase health care.
Principles: In an ideal world, a free market of equals provides the best solution to all problems. However, in the real world those who require health care trade at a permanent disadvantage, not having the time, knowledge, or sometimes even mental capacity to compare alternatives before buying. In many cases there are no alternatives to compare. As a result massive fraud is perpetrated on the sick—fraud which prices the poor out of health care altogether.
Solutions: Malpractice must be taken out of the civil courts and placed firmly into criminal courts. False or frivolous claims of malpractice should be prosecuted as the crime of false arrest. Charging extortionate prices for services rendered to the urgently ill without prior disclosure of said prices should be recognized as fraud, and should be prosecuted accordingly. All drugs discovered through research funded by government subsidy should be placed in the public domain, not subject to patent and monopoly. Regulations which require the purchase of health insurance, which restrict the availability of health treatments or procedures, or which work to inhibit competition in the marketplace must be repealed.
Benefits: Once the wealth incentive is taken away and real consequences instituted for frivolous lawsuits, malpractice insurance will become a thing of the past, thereby removing the single largest cause of inflated healthcare costs. Once fraud is aggressively prosecuted in healthcare, prices will drop still further. With government owning all government-funded research results, either drug companies will refuse said funding—reducing the cost of government—or else new drugs will appear instantly in a competitive market, vastly reducing the cost of medicine. Only by addressing these root causes of inflated health costs can medicine be made affordable for the common man.
Author's Comments
This plank will offend knee-jerk Libertarians who think the free market can do no wrong. The more I think about it, though, the more convinced I become that laissez faire health care will not work. When you have a broken arm, a heart attack, or some other urgent and immediate ailment, you do not have time to compare prices and seek the best deal. You need medical attention at once, from the first provider available. Health care providers know this, and mark up their goods and services by anything from 100% to 10,000%. Worst of all, they do not reveal their prices for their services until after they have been rendered, leaving the patient no option but to pay.
This system has worked in this way for several reasons. First, government attempts to police healthcare providers has been sporadic at best. Second, insurance companies and government programs such as Medicare and Medicaid pay with little complaint the inflated prices- thus providing the healthcare providers with guaranteed income. Finally, large corporations have lobbied government to enact regulation to ensure that this state of affairs either continues or expands—as witness George W. Bush's Medicare Plan D "reforms."
Most of this is common knowledge to the voters. Claims that removing regulation from healthcare will lower prices will not be believed- it runs entirely counter to all experience. We must attack the root causes of the problem, and do so on Libertarian grounds. For this reason I make the focus of my attention the issue of fraud.
Unfortunately, this is the best I can do with healthcare policy given the Libertarian principle. This is an issue I'm well outside party dogma on. I have no real hope that the LP will ever win voters based on its healthcare policies (except those who favor alternative medicines such as acupuncture). This is just my best shot at a Libertarian position which addresses the issue in a way that might appeal to the people... but it certainly won't appeal to the purists in the party itself.
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