![]() ![]() ![]() When people point to health care as some sort of proof that markets don’t work, they are either displaying their utter ignorance of what markets actually look like or they know the truth and are lying. Other than some growing pockets of free enterprise like The Surgery Center of Oklahoma, which provides upfront pricing, there is little in the way of free markets operating in health care. If you think the previous paragraph doesn’t describe a crony scheme designed to bilk trillions out of regular Americans who can’t really afford it, then there is a wonderful Ponzi scheme someone is putting together that you would be interested in, as well as some ocean-front property in Arizona you might like to buy. The patient/employee barely even gets to see the bills, and co-pays and balances that patients pay are usually so high, that you’d think they were the final bills, but patients actually pay only a percentage, and the actual total paid by insurance is often unknown to patients. Insurance companies contract with employers, not patients. ![]() Doctors and hospitals contract with insurance companies, not patients. It’s nearly impossible to get even an estimate, much less a commitment, to a price for the simplest of medical procedures. In my own experience, I have been charged $700 for a boot that, I discovered later, could be bought for $70, brand-new, on the internet (for more examples, see Overcharged: Why Americans Pay Too Much for Health Care). The problem with having third parties like health insurance companies, Medicare/Medicaid, the VA, and others pay 90 percent of what’s spent on health care is that prices have ceased to discipline the system. The incentive is to “pay” employees by handing piles of cash to third parties we call health insurance companies as part of a now-gigantic tax avoidance scheme. Federal income tax law explicitly exempts employer-paid benefits from taxation, including health insurance (actually pre-paid health care and not true insurance at all). In most states, medical services are not sales taxed, an advantage that accrues to medical providers as much as consumers. It extends to incentives in the law, especially tax laws. The crony privileges that the extraordinarily wealthy health industry enjoys extend beyond governments handing over the money of taxpayers with relatively modest incomes. Nonprofit hospitals, especially in urban areas, and none of which pay income tax, are extremely wealthy, and multi-million-dollar salaries for their CEOs are common. Many states provide scholarships to medical students. That doesn’t count the states’ share of Medicaid spending or a host of other health-related programs. Federal spending alone on Medicaid, Medicare, and Obamacare exchange subsidies amounted to 5.4 percent of GDP in 2017 in 1995 the percentage was closer to three percent. Of the top-20 average-salaried occupations in the nation, 15 are in some form of medicine lawyers rank 23 rd. Over one-sixth of the nation’s economy is devoted to health care. He gave the common people their own hard-earned money first stolen from them by a corrupt government. He didn’t grant largesse to the poverty-stricken masses toiling in an exploitive economic system after he robbed rich capitalists. Robin Hood was a freedom fighter, not a revolutionary. Little is more evil than using government’s monopoly of force to take from those of modest means to create and serve a wealthy privileged class. The poor who benefited from Robin Hood’s supposed brigandage were common folk subjected to the oppressive yoke of high taxes that the evil Sheriff and corrupt Prince distributed to their rich cronies in order to stay in power. Robin Hood is famous for “taking from the rich and giving to the poor,” but the rich from whom he took were the Sheriff of Nottingham and his buddy, the usurper Prince John, and their cronies. ![]()
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