At The Center Of The Health Care Mess

EVERYONE agrees that the health care system is a mess. But that is where agreement ends. Democrats believe that the solution to the mess is universal health care, maybe a single-payer system like Canada.

Republicans think that the problem is rather different. It is that few people actually know what they are paying for health care. What is needed is a true market in health care so that the price system can do its magic, just like it does in houses, in automobiles, and in movie tickets.

As Scott W. Atlas writes:

Unlike other products and services, consumers use medical care without having any idea of its true costs. Can you imagine buying a house, a car or a dress without knowing what it would cost? Without price information, it is impossible to be an informed customer.

It�s the old, old problem that we spent the entire twentieth century arguing about, although Ludwig von Mises resolved the it with a paper in 1920, subsequently expanded into a book, Socialism.

The problem with a socialist commonwealth, he wrote, is that you cannot compute prices, and that means that you don�t have a clue what things cost. For that reason, Mises predicted, three years after the Bolshevik Revolution, that socialism would never work.

In the United States we have our own socialized sector and it is just as messed up as the old Soviet economy. In education, in health care, and in government welfare, nobody knows the cost of anything, and nobody cares.

President Bush has proposed that the cost of health insurance should be exposed by limiting the amount you can deduct in your income tax return. That�s a start. But Atlas recommends also that:

�the prices of medical procedures be fully available and clearly presented to patients before any medical procedure�
�qualifications of doctors be made available to their potential patients�

That is surely not too much to ask.

Of course, if we make the health care system �transparent� it is going to change everything to do with health care. Given that health care is 15 percent of the economy, the transition will be staggering. People will be looking for someone to blame for the pain of it all.

Look for the innocent to be lynched, and the guilty to go free.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Civil Society

“Civil Society”—a complex welter of intermediate institutions, including businesses, voluntary associations, educational institutions, clubs, unions, media, charities, and churches—builds, in turn, on the family, the primary instrument by which people are socialized into their culture and given the skills that allow them to live in broader society and through which the values and knowledge of that society are transmitted across the generations.
Francis Fukuyama, Trust

Hugo on Genius

“Tear down theory, poetic systems� No more rules, no more models� Genius conjures up rather than learns� ” —Victor Hugo
C�sar Gra�a, Bohemian versus Bourgeois

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Postmodernism

A writer who says that there are no truths, or that all truth is ’merely relative’, is asking you not to believe him. So don’t.
Roger Scruton, Modern Philosophy

Faith and Politics

As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, the principal focus of her interventions in the public arena is the protection and promotion of the dignity of the person, and she is thereby consciously drawing particular attention to principles which are not negotiable... [1.] protection of life in all its stages, from the first moment of conception until natural death; [2.] recognition and promotion of the natural structure of the family... [3.] the protection of the right of parents to educate their children.
Pope Benedict XVI, Speech to European Peoples Party, 2006

China and Christianity

At first, we thought [the power of the West] was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.
David Aikman, Jesus in Beijing

Religion, Property, and Family

But the only religions that have survived are those which support property and the family. Thus the outlook for communism, which is both anti-property and anti-family, (and also anti-religion), is not promising.
F.A. Hayek, The Fatal Conceit

Conservatism

Conservatism is the philosophy of society. Its ethic is fraternity and its characteristic is authority — the non-coercive social persuasion which operates in a family or a community. It says ‘we should...’.
Danny Kruger, On Fraternity

US Life in 1842

Families helped each other putting up homes and barns. Together, they built churches, schools, and common civic buildings. They collaborated to build roads and bridges. They took pride in being free persons, independent, and self-reliant; but the texture of their lives was cooperative and fraternal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

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