Saturday, November 20, 2010

Why Doctors Don’t Want Free-Market Medicine

Why Doctors Don’t Want Free-Market Medicine
by Theodore Levy • The Freeman • July/August 2010
You may have heard that the AMA and “America’s physicians” favor universal health care. That’s true of the AMA, but that organization represents fewer than 20 percent of the nation’s doctors. And it’s true of many academic university physicians, but anecdotally it is obviously untrue of most doctors in private practice. Many of those docs desire to “get government out of medicine.”
But those physicians have a problem, of a sort that “getting government out of medicine” doesn’t solve। । । ।
To read the answers, go to THE FREEMAN IDEAS ON LIBERTY
www.thefreemanonline.org, July/August 2010 • Volume: 60 • Issue: 6 • Print This Post • 15 comments

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Health Care Reform: Moving Horizontally

Health Care Reform: Moving Horizontally
President Barrack Hussein Obama’s Health Care Dismemberment may have hindered true Health Care Reform। However, as we have learned from the computer industry, Health Care Reform will eventually win as it moves from a vertical to a horizontal industry.
In the 1980s, as the main frame companies, IBM, Burroughs, UNISYS, and others, were in financial straits, President Reagan did not succumb to the requests for bailouts as did our current president. He allowed Burroughs to be absorbed by UNISYS and others including IBM were able to regroup. This, however, provided the stimulus for the personal computer revolution. The PC could be mass produced for a fraction of the cost and by many different manufacturers all competing for the greatest efficiencys. It also transformed or revolutionized the computer industry from the vertical integrated companies, such as IBM and others, to the horizontal PC industry. Start ups could produce chips, keyboards, screens, hard drives, floppy disks, as well as software, storage devices, batteries, and other accessories driving the price downward.
Health care is prevented from similar efficiency by Congress which has limited innovations and prevented physician competition, not only in their practices, but also in their technology support arena. This has, in many cases, required them to use the vertical integrated and more expensive structures, such as hospitals, for MRIs, video-assisted surgery which remain shielded from competition and thus continue an upward cost spiral.
Physicians should maintain their optimism that continuing to practice in the open medical MarketPlace will eventually allow them the economies and the ascendancies that the PC revolution gave to the computer industry despite the current health care setback under our current administration.
Hospitals will not and should not disappear. But they will reformat, much as IBM which no longer competes in the horizontal PC MarketPlace. Hospitals will evolve into a new and more sophisticated format and no longer compete with the private outpatient ambulatory practice of medicine.