Total Separation of Medicine and State?

The Libertarians inform me that Obamacare is wrong, and the correct fix for our abysmal public health system is total separation of medicine and government. I believe they might be on the right track here, if by TOTAL separation they mean to end the laws which make it illegal for anyone to provide to anyone else any kind of ameliorative care without the certifications of the AMA. Open up medicine to true free market competition, and the cost would plummet. End government enforcement of the medical industry’s monopoly on the right to sell medical products and services, and more important, their right to define what is and what is not medicine such that they should have a market monopoly on it, and the price of common health care would go down like a pompom boy in the shower. You'd still pay a ton for a robot heart, or a transplant, but you could get a couple of stitches or a tooth pulled for the cost of an oil change in your car.

I'm all for private business, large and small. I know it’s not what they teach you to get that MBA, which I don’t have, but it seems to me there has to be a point at which something is more important to anyone selling a product or a service than the money he can make doing it. I could be wrong about that.

Don't whine to me about how we have to have the government in there with their law enforcement pistoleros to "protect us" from quacks, or from our own vices. A real free market would quickly weed out the medical quacks. Like being able to tell whether a line of cars is fine engineering, or painted up lemons, we are able to tell the good healers from the quacks without even a lot of education. The healers will clean you up, sew you up, get your body running correctly, and teach you how to take care of it. The quacks will sell you a lifetime prescription for symptom-treating pharmaceuticals that are poisonous and addictive as junk, so you can't quit taking them.... QUACK QUACK QUACK!

What about the good doctors? There are certainly many of them. But… when it costs half a million bucks and more just to get that MD, and half of that every year to buy insurance to protect themselves from predatory suit, and they must charge the patient for superfluous tests made to protect the doctor from the potential plaintiff’s lawyer, the system does not favor the individual who would like to be a genuine health care provider to the commonly-paid citizen.

The political solution to the health care problem? Fuggittaboutit! You could elect the ghost of Lincoln, or Roosevelt, either of them, hell, you could bring back Ronald Reagan, and as long as the discussion is not about providing actual health CARE to people, but only about using the IRS or the Courts and Police to provide mandatory health INSURANCE premiums, we aren't going to succeed, and we'll continue to drop dead addicted to phony opiates and tranquilizers, or go bankrupt for a week’s stay in the Healin’ Hilton. As long as so-called "free market conservatives" think if the CEOs and stockholders are making money our health care system is working, we people won't have real health care, employed or not. Don't forget that for the medical industry, providing health care benefits is not the profit part, it is the expense part, and they will do their best to minimize it. Ever scratch your car? You find your insurance company has a staff of "adjustors" whose job is to find a way to justify paying you less, while raising your premiums. What makes you think medical insurance is different? As with the salaried people who work for the corporations: paying “workers” is not the company's objective, it is just another of its expenses, which they want to minimize. The objective is Conservatively clear: enable the few who hold the papers of ownership of the corporations to make money, and the more the better, ad absurdum. It is basic trickle-down theory, whether under feudal lords, gangsters, CEOs, Popes, or kings, that as long as the rich are getting richer, the rest of us will grow fat on the crumbs falling from their table. Even good shepherds do not build folds because they love the sheep, but because they know the price of mutton and wool. Don't look now, Little Bo Peep, but what is on that table is lamb chops. Baaaaa! Baaaaa!
James Nathan Post THE ANTI-CYCLOPS PAPERS