Liberty v Notliberty - How that would look in health care

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=766502dd-9970-40e2-bf64-11b05c5577de&p=2

This is TNR's unimaginative view of a non-govt option insurance future. It completely ignores all of the existing govt incentives that prevent insurance competition. In any issue of liberty, and govt coercion exerted towards how citizens receive and pay for health care is certainly a matter of liberty, the default should be towards no govt intervention - or the least possible amount if intervention is judged necessary. In this case, the 'least possible intervention' would be to remove existing govt interventions and allow the market to work.

Here's a piece written by the late Milton Friedman describing how that could be approached:

http://www.hoover.org/publications/digest/3459466.html



Unfortunately, the political scene is not fertile for ideas about how great liberty is. The only political ideas that sell, presently, are how govt can take a little bit of your liberty (the phrase "only $19.95" comes to mind) but will give you much much much more in return.



Which reminds me of this quote:

"The society that puts equality before freedom will end up with neither. The society that puts freedom before equality will end up with a good measure of both." Milton Friedman