http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=766502dd-9970-40e2-bf64-11b05c5577de&p=2
My letter to the TNR regarding this story:
The author chose not to comment on all the existing government interventions which have resulted in the currently non-competitive health care insurance market. For those who value liberty - and given that government coercion in the markplace is an affront to liberty - the obvious first step is to remove market distorting government interventions.
The vast majority of what is broken in the US's present health care system is described by Michael Porter of Harvard as a 'broken value chain.' Consumers of health care are insulated from costs and providers of both health care and health care insurance policies are insulated from competition by government interventions. The result is a system that incentivises behaviors like defensive medicine, overconsumption of unneeded care, low quality of information about what treatments and providers are most effective, and business processes and systems which are not responsive to either patient or provider needs. In the end, I'm sure we'll get some bloated, unaffordable govt program which will further validate the Milton Friedman maxim that the negative eventualities of any government intervention rapidly become the justification for the next.
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