Healthcare

This has been a year of astonishing policy failure. We are surrounded by devastation conceived and cheered by intellectuals and their political handmaidens.

Under real capitalism, there is no government policy at all regarding how people are to conduct themselves in a pandemic. With no barriers to innovation, production, and distribution, the pharmaceutical industry would be rocketing us into an almost disease-free future.

What do the Great Depression and the Second World War have in common with the coronavirus crisis of 2020? They have all been caused by government! 

The term “socialized medicine” is never used. Instead we hear demands for “universal,” “mandatory,” “single-payer,” and/or “comprehensive” systems.

Governor Ron DeSantis has proven it: it is actually possible for a politician to wise up and do the right thing. In a sweeping order announced September 25, the governor has opened up the entire economy.

Abolish the FDA. Repeal medical licensing.

The kind of reasoning that underpins the tired old asymmetric information bogeyman in health care falls straight into the behavioral symmetry between market participants and policy makers that is a core contribution of modern public choice economics: it is not believable to submit that governments have magic wands.

As for Medicare for All, the COVID-19 crisis in Canada has shown the brutal consequences of government-run health care: shortages just when you need care the most.

We need new drugs to fight COVID-19 and other diseases. But our government’s approval process makes that too hard.

The COVID-19 crisis is the result of decades of FDA rule.

Because nobody had an incentive to stockpile PPE or other medical equipment.

Three simple reforms: (1) posted prices for procedures; (2) Goodman-esque health savings accounts and high-deductible insurance; (3) age rather than community rating.

Why weren’t there enough Wuhan Corona Virus (COVID-19) tests? Because our government insists on control of medical innovation.

Highly restrictive government regulations have had the unintended consequence of shutting down tests that could detect outbreaks and save lives.

The South Korean government has brought about superior outcomes than the much heavier handed, authoritarian measures of China, Italy, the U.S., and virtually every other afflicted nation. 

In order for government to provide medical services to someone who cannot afford it, it must use intimidation, threats, and coercion to take the earnings of another American to provide that service.

In health care, and all fields, it’s better to see what competition can do rather than letting the government and its cronies decide what to allow.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., wants “Medicare for All,” as does Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., her self-described “Democratic socialist” rival. Unlike Sanders, however, Warren claims she can finance her plan by raising taxes only on the...

The pursuit of one form or another of third-party payment for health care services has removed most incentives for consumers to be careful about how they spend money.

Ask every politician promising to take over your medical care what they are doing for the veterans now in their care, or for those veterans who have died while languishing on lists while waiting for it.

Elizabeth Warren has vehemently refused to say if the middle class would see its taxes go up to pay for M4A or how she would pay for this.

The path to genetic cures and radical life extension begins with the abolition of that Servant of Death: the FDA.

People say America has free-market health care, but we don’t, and we haven’t since World War II. Government and government-subsidized insurance companies currently spend most of America’s health dollars.

The end of the “mandate” or tax to force individuals to enroll in ObamaCare will not restore the lost private insurance that President Obama falsely promised we could keep, but it has ended a gross injustice.

We live in an age when the secretary of the Interior and the White House press secretary proudly and publicly proclaim that they will keep their “boot on the neck” of an oil company. This new manifestation of “hope” and “change” is...

As long as there is demand for (willingness-to-buy) snake oil products there will be snake oil businesses.

New legislation would throw a lifeline to individual terminally ill patients, giving them the “right to try” treatments that have been deemed safe by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) but which have not yet obtained final approval.

While the Affordable Care Act (ACA) promises “quality health insurance coverage for all Americans,” a potential tradeoff exists between the law’s dual goals of promoting quality and preventing insurance companies from denying coverage or charging higher premiums to patients with preexisting conditions.