As valid today as it was when it was first written for the occasion of Hillary Healthcare, Dr. George Reisman’s 1994 essay, “THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE, is a must read in anticipation of Obama’s obfuscating oratory tonight. As Dr. Reisman puts it, “It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America’s medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis.”
Begin with the premise undergirding the Obama argument:
“For over a century, virtually all proposals for economic or social reform have been based on the thoroughly mistaken philosophical and theoretical foundations of Marxism, and have aimed at the ultimate achievement of a socialist society, in the belief that socialism represented the most rational and moral system of mankind’s social organization. On the basis of this conviction, individual freedom was progressively restricted and the power of the state progressively enlarged. Individual freedom—laissez faire capitalism—was assumed to be a system of chaos and of the exploitation of the masses by the capitalists. The onslaught of the socialists (who in this country call themselves “liberals”)—the step-by-step achievement of their political agenda—encountered virtually no philosophical resistance. Not surprisingly, again and again, the “liberals” defeated their ill-equipped conservative adversaries, who at most could only delay their advance. The victories of the “liberals” were inevitable because it was a battle of men with the seeming vision of a better world that could be achieved by means of intelligent human effort based on a body of ideas (however mistaken those ideas were), against men who, while they valued the relatively free world they saw around them, had no significant philosophical or theoretical knowledge of how to defend it.”
Move on to an understanding of your rights. Who exactly is violating these immutable rights?
“… the right to medical care does not mean a right to medical care as such, but to the medical care one can buy from willing providers. One’s right to medical care is violated not when there is medical care that one cannot afford to buy, but when there is medical care that one could afford to buy if one were not prevented from doing so by the initiation of physical force. It is violated by medical licensing legislation and by every other form of legislation and regulation that artificially raises the cost of medical care and thereby prevents people from obtaining the medical care they otherwise could have obtained from willing providers. The precise nature of such legislation and regulation we shall see in detail, in due course.”
“This then is the concept of rights, and specifically of rights to things, that I uphold. One’s rights to things are rights only to things one can obtain in free trade, with the voluntary consent of those who are to provide them. All such rights are predicated upon full respect for the persons and property of others.”
The solution? A Free Market in Medical Care:
“To be successful, such reform must approach the problem of bringing down medical costs from two sides: on the one side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in demand for medical care fostered by the alleged need-based right to medical care and the collectivization of costs to pay for it. On the other side, the reduction and ultimate total elimination of the artificial increase in medical costs caused both by the alleged need-based right to medical care and by medical licensing. Everything that rolls back the artificial increase in demand for medical care will, of course, operate to reduce medical costs, but there also needs to be more direct action as well. This is necessary both in order to speed up the process of cost reduction and insofar as the artificial increase in demand for medical care has led to increased government intervention into medical care and to irrational standards of medical malpractice. These latter will not go away just by means of reducing the artificial increase in demand for medical care. Nor will medical licensing and its contribution to the high cost of medical care.”
“Approaching the matter from both sides will make possible a process of mutually self-reinforcing cumulative success in bringing down medical costs. That is, not only will the rollback of the artificial increase in the demand for medical care bring down the cost of medical care, but everything that serves directly to bring down the cost of medical care will make such rollback all the more likely.”
READ the entire piece.
