A brilliant post by Kevin Carson, Honest Statism Beats a Fake “Free Market” Every Time, discussing an article by Matt Welch in the January issue of Reason, makes a persuasive case that there is little reason to think that the French “socialized” healthcare system is inferior to the nominally “private” American healthcare system. Yes, a real free market system would be preferable to either the French, or the current American system. “But enemies of Obamacare need to drop the bullshit about the American healthcare system being ‘the best in the world,’ and defending it as ‘our free market system.’ … there’s really nothing all that astonishing about a comparatively well-run socialized system beating a really incompetent and slipshod mixed government-private system.”
They have a point. I am not sure if I believe that the Western welfare states’ socialized healthcare systems are so obviously superior to the current American system, as distorted as it is by state involvement, but it’s not hard to believe that the kluged “public/private” system that Congress is about to produce will be even worse than straight-out socialized medicine. And suppose we do get a version of socialized medicine, and the typical person likes it better than our current bastardized system–they’ll then believe socialism is superior to the market! That’s a reason we opponents of socialism need to make it clear that the current system is not a free market system, that most of the things people dislike about the current system are due to state involvement, and that increasing state involvement will only make matters worse than it could be under a free market system.
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Has anybody thought about publishing a “layman’s guide to American health care”? I’m not sure if such a book already exists, but the idea is to envelop the book in a “non-partisan” title, and then explain the current American health care system. The language would have be carefully reviewed, as I think that anything coming off as excessively free-market would immediately garner negative points. The purpose would be to attract a fair amount of “non-liberty inclined” individuals and provide them with a true and objective look at our current health care system.
Thanks, Stephan. I suspect a socialized system like the British National Health would be easier to marketize than our “free market” system, by simply making individual clinics and hospitals self-financing and making management responsible to member-owners on a consumer co-op model instead of to the government.
Hey look, Second bests!
I wasn’t aware the state has ever been marketized…
There is no third solution.