Dark Horses

Agitators for national health insurance assume as a matter of course that problems in our medical economy result from private failure and require correction through public intervention.

By slow degrees this well-nigh universal axiom is giving way to factual studies that show the relationship is quite the other way around: that the medical problems we experience, with few exceptions, are caused by government intervention in the marketplace, and that further interventions will almost surely make them worse. The point has begun to emerge in tentative fashion from studies conducted by the government itself, as it tries to grapple with the nightmare of rising healthcare costs. Thus the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in its recently published Forward Plan for Health (U.S. Government Printing Office, $1.90), acknowledges that the prevailing system of third-party payment—in which 90 per cent of hospital costs and two-thirds of physicians’ bills are picked up for the patient—is “perhaps the principal factor contributing to rising health-care costs.”

MS

About the Author

M. Stanton Evans

Agitators for national health insurance assume as a matter of course that problems in our medical economy result from private failure and require correction through public intervention.

By slow degrees this well-nigh universal axiom is giving way to factual studies that show the relationship is quite the other way around: that the medical problems we experience, with few exceptions, are caused by government intervention in the marketplace, and that further interventions will almost surely make them worse. The point has begun to emerge in tentative fashion from studies conducted by the government itself, as it tries to grapple with the nightmare of rising healthcare costs. Thus the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare, in its recently published Forward Plan for Health (U.S. Government Printing Office, $1.90), acknowledges that the prevailing system of third-party payment—in which 90 per cent of hospital costs and two-thirds of physicians’ bills are picked up for the patient—is “perhaps the principal factor contributing to rising health-care costs.”