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Dean Baker's commentary on economic reporting

McCain Does Not Want Free Market Health Care

Senator McCain likes to say that he supports free market health care, but it is not true and it is time that the media stop letting him get away with this deception. (That is after they get to the bottom of the Obama flag-pin lapel matter.)

How does McCain not support a free market? Well, he is a big supporter of patent protection for prescription drugs and medical devices. As a result of the intervention that McCain supports, drugs that would sell for $4 a prescription at Wal-Mart instead sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars per prescription. (Yes, patents support innovation -- but they ARE a government intervention, they are not the free market, no matter how much drug companies like them. And, we have far more efficient mechanisms to finance research.)

McCain has never raised any objections to all the professional licensing and immigration barriers that keep doctors' salaries much higher in the United States than in other wealthy countries. Anyone who really supported free market health care would be screaming over these barriers. And, McCain has never supported measures that would make it easier for people in the United States to take advantage of the much lower cost health care available in other countries. This would also be a top agenda item for anyone who really believed in a free market in health care.

In short, it is very clear that Senator McCain does not in fact support a free market in health care. He supports the government interventions that keep the cost of health care in the United States high, and incidentally allow drug companies, insurance companies, and highly paid medical specialists to prosper.

Senator McCain's distortions on health care are far more important than Senator Clinton's distortions on sniper fire in Bosnia. How about some serious reporting on the issue?

--Dean Baker



COMMENTS

Of course no journalist will ever point out the following free market rethoric to presidential candidates :).

" Just to illustrate how great out ignorance of the optimum forms of delimitation of various rights remains - despite our confidence in the indispensability of the general institution of several property - a few remarks about one particuilar form of property may be made. [...]

The difference between these and other kinds of property rights is this: while ownership of material goods guides the user of scarce means to their most important uses, in the case of immaterial goods such as literary productions and technological inventions the ability to produce them is also limited, yet once they have come into existence, they can be indefinitely multiplied and can be made scarce only by law in order to create an inducement to produce such ideas. Yet it is not obvious that such forced scarcity is the most effective way to stimulate the human creative process. I doubt whether there exists a single great work of literature which we would not possess had the author been unable to obtain an exclusive copyright for it; it seems to me that the case for copyright must rest almost entirely on the circumstance that such exceedingly useful works as encyclopaedias, dictionaries, textbooks and other works of reference could not be produced if, once they existed, they could freely be reproduced.

Similarly, recurrent re-examinations of the problem have not demonstrated that the obtainability of patents of invention actually enhances the flow of new technical knowledge rather than leading to wasteful concentration of research on problems whose solution in the near future can be foreseen and where, in consequence of the law, anyone who hits upon a solution a moment before the next gains the right to its exclusive use for a prolonged period.

The Fatal Conceit: The Errors of Socialism, 1988 (p. 35) Friedrich von Hayek"

McCain's status quo approach is to continue to support the health insurance model that maximizes profit by denying coverage and claims. Every claim that is paid represents an income loss to the health care company. Every sick person that is covered represents an income loss to the health care insurance company. There is no way around it.

The model is inappropriate and cannot be fixed.

This post cofuses terms. An economic system which rigs things to heavily favor the affluent over the lower classes just is what is called a "free market." Anyone who has taken an intro to economics class will walk away understanding that putting the lives and livelihoods of the vulnerable and underpriveleged at risk, and even outright destroying them, is always to be encouraged when the result will be more money for the already wealthy--that's a free market. And those who say that maybe its not all right in every single instance to destroy lives in order to make money for rich people are known as the anti-American left, socialists, and other ill-defined dirty words.
Such free market systems are not evil because economists have taught us to disregard our normal, everyday concept of evil in favor of "science," the same way realists in international relations will sometimes ethusiastically advocate and even carry out mass murder in the name of science over naive, inapplicable, folk morality.

Thank you for the sensible critique. Me & my neighbour were preparing to do some research about that. We got a good book on that matter from our local library and most books where not as influensive as your information. I am very glad to see such information which I was searching for a long time.This made very glad Smile

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