Taxpayers fund about half of all medical industry transactions, and governments regulate that as well as a huge chunk of the rest. No wonder medicine is in chaos.
Economist Charles Sable asserts that he knows how to make health care better. Arnold Kling, on EconLog, reports Sable as saying that “health care providers need to be able to improve by learning from and correcting mistakes. He then proceeds to offer legislation to force that.”
But Kling offers an interesting challenge: “If you know a better way to run health care organizations, why don’t you start a health care organization?”
As opposed to dictating by law how others should manage theirs.
Kling, an economist who has run a business or two, thinks that when “a liberal/progressive proposal is supposed to do X,” the liberal “expert” should “start a private entity to do X.” He sees no reason why the medical industry would be immune to such challenge:
If health care providers are doing a bad job, what stops you from implementing a better model and taking over the market? Are consumers too stupid to know the difference between providers who make lots of unnecessary mistakes and providers who don’t? If they are so stupid as consumers, why do you expect them to be smart as voters?
In the real world, we could use people with ideas who really run with them — not stand back and tell some other folks how to run yet another bunch of folks’ lives and businesses.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
2 replies on “Reform Challenge”
Lib/prog-ism is about never having to say- you’ll deal with the consequences.
That is why the first step is always to blow up the stuff that is working and that you have now. Start with a clean slate on the ashes and rubble of what existed before. When Marx was planning his revolution, one of the problems he ran into was that the workers that he was trying to foment to revolt were actually not that dissatisfied with the status quo. He wrote that for his revolution to succeed, the workers must first be “educated as to their discomfiture.” They must first be taught about how unhappy and dissatisfied that they were. Really hard to do that if they had an option of making a head-to-head comparison between what they had and what was being proferred. Much easier if what they had was first turned into smoldering wreckage and then their memories could be spun and slanted about not being all that good.
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