The Objective Standard Blog

Monday, June 4, 2007

Doctor Defends Freedom in Medicine

Posted by Craig Biddle at 12:17 pm

Dr. Paul Hsieh has written an excellent op-ed opposing efforts to socialize medicine in Colorado. It begins:

The Colorado Blue Ribbon Commission on Health Care Reform recently selected four health care reform proposals for eventual consideration by the Colorado legislature. Although they differ in their details, these differences are dwarfed by their fundamental similarity – they all entail a massive increase in government interference in medicine in the name of "universal coverage."

All four plans inject government force into the doctor-patient relationship. They include some combination of forcing all residents into a single health program, forcing some or all individuals and/or businesses to purchase a state-approved insurance policy, requiring insurance companies to provide new additional benefits, establishing a new bureaucracy to set payments to the doctors for services they provide, and doubling the Colorado Medicaid population.

These are just disguised forms of socialized medicine.

Similar programs already have been tried in states and other countries. They have all failed, resulting only in higher costs and lower quality patient care. The TennCare disaster—Tennessee’s failed attempt at "universal coverage"—offers an important lesson for Colorado.

Read it all, and email it to anyone you know in the healthcare industry.

For additional articles in defense of individual rights and free markets in medicine, visit the website of FIRM ( Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine). This organization is worthy of everyone’s selfish support.

Posted in: Business and Economics, Health Care, Individual Rights and Law