Medical Care, Insurance, and Socialized Medicine

Part of the "Critiques of Libertarianism" site.
http://world.std.com/~mhuben/libindex.html

Last updated 10/25/07.

Libertarians, with their ideological demands of minimal government, see no role for government in medicine or medical insurance. However, the market failures are so severe, the incentives so perverted, that the mostly private US system has bottom-ranked health care outcomes.

Socialized medicine; socialized medical insurance; drug, medical device, and therapy regulation; government management of epidemiology and vaccination; extension of these to dentistry: these are all anathema to libertarians and most other conservatives. Worldwide experience shows that the uniquely private (in the first world) US system gives the worst results, but at the highest price.

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Links

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NEW 1/06: Health Care Confidential

Brad DeLong quotes Paul Krugman's New York Times article on the success of the Veteran's Health Administration. Medical insurance and health care have such poor market incentives that our centralized bureaucracy can easily outperform markets. A strong argument for nationalized health care.

Canadian Socialized Medicine.

A sarcastic retort to a libertarian by Greg Erwin in support of the Canadian medical system. A fun read that touches on many of the often-recited myths.

NEW 10/06: The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology

Jeffry Sachs' Scientific American article on how social welfare states do as well as or better than low-tax, high-income countries. The punch line is that Friedrich Von Hayek was wrong.

Copyright 2007 by Mike Huben ( mhuben@world.std.com ).
This document may be freely distributed for non-commercial purposes if it is reproduced in its textual entirety, with this notice intact.