Resolved: Health care should be left to the free market

Chicago Lawyers Chapter

Tavern Debate

Food, clothing, shelter, medicine. Which of these human needs is not like the others?

There is much talk these days that health care is somehow "different." Yet for many, it's not clear why. The normal laws of economic gravity are not suspended for just one sector of the economy.  The mechanisms that provide cheap food, designer jeans, and indoor plumbing for even the least among us can surely do the same for medical care. Competition will provide. Right?

No, say critics. Our current system, where most care is provided by rapacious capitalists, has left 30 million people uninsured. Costs rise without end. The sick and uninsured are left destitute. Pharmaceutical,
medical device, and insurance companies grow fat. Furthermore, the free market can never fix this, because those on the way to the emergency room are not free to choose. Nor is the average patient qualified to select the most cost-effective treatment in the same way he or she selects groceries or clothing. It requires an expert.
Or a bureaucrat with the patient's best interests are heart.  Isn't health care provided with the efficiency of the post office and the compassion of the IRS still preferable to expensive or non-existent care? Can we really rely upon greedy, self-interested capitalists to provide us the care we need when we are poor, elderly, in pain,
desperate? Or is this just another step down the road to socialism,rationing, and misery?

 

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