[ExI] More on US Health Care Costs

[Dan]

--- On Fri, 5/22/09, BillK <pharos at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The U.S. has “the least efficient health care
>> system in the world,”
>> said Kevin Schulman, director of the health
>> management program at Duke
>> University in Durham, North Carolina. “These
>> costs keep growing
>> despite the recession, and health care is going
>> to shoot up as a
>> percentage of our GDP even more. It’s just
>> spooky.”
> 
> Market systems of trading have two opposing forces.
> 1) competition forces prices down to minimum producer
> survival levels.
> 2) monopolies or niche markets force prices up to the
> maximum that the
> market will bear.
> 
> The US health market has concentrated on 2).
> So long as there are sufficient rich people or companies
> able to pay
> the top prices, then prices will keep increasing.

Aside from the monopolies, though, the whole system is highly regulated and the government pumps money into it.  These two other factors drive up prices.  And the solution should be: remove the monopolies, the regulations, and the subsidies.*  Instead, it looks like the solution the elites want is: increase monopolization, increase regulation, and increase the subsidies.

Regards,

Dan

*  Others have recommended similar changes in the past and were ignored.  E.g., Hoppe did in 1993 at:

http://mises.org/freemarket_detail.aspx?control=279