Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Krugman: Economics Doesn't Apply to Medicine

The Great Regressive Economist, Paul Krugman, who is the Great Apologist for All Things Regressing Because of Regressives Policies, has a heavy burden on his shoulders. I'm waiting for a regressive  author to come out with the regressive version of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, to be appropriately titled Krugman Shrugged.

The latest demand on Krugman's apologist skills come as the result of the fact that price controls in the healthcare industry are creating shortages.

Krugman's attempt to divert attention from regressive interventionist policies begins this way:
I keep encountering discussions of health economics in which patients are referred to as “consumers”, after which the usual mantra of freedom of choice is invoked on behalf of voucherizing Medicare, or whatever.
Got that? When it comes to the most important choices of your life, you are not a consumer with choices. Your decisions will be made by those more intelligent than you:
Medical care is an area in which crucial decisions — life and death decisions — must be made; yet making those decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.
Puhleeze, given Krugman's view, since dead people aren't making decisions, it's amazing their bodies find thier way into coffins.

Obviously, when someone is incapacitated, others will be required to make decisions for them, but what does any of this have to do with repealing the laws of economics? There is still a cost to medical care and it has to be paid somehow, either privately or through some type of regressive socilaized program. Economics is not eliminated.

Further, incapacitation is involved in a small number of medical treatments. The large majority of treatments are done with the patient/consumer fully aware that he is being treaty. And, there is nothing preventing a person designating a medical group as having complete authorization to perform necessary medical treatment if that person becomes incapacitated at some point.

Krugman raises the further point that:
..making those [medical] decisions intelligently requires a vast amount of specialized knowledge; and often those decisions must also be made under conditions in which the patient is incapacitated, under severe stress, or needs action immediately, with no time for discussion, let alone comparison shopping.
But this is what the division of labor is all about, people in all walks of life have specialized skills and knowledge. I don't need to know the specifics of the knowledge to hire the skills of these people.

I don't need to know all the details of how a cell phone is made before I buy one. I don't need to know all the details of the tax code before I hire a tax accountant and I don't need to know a language in advance before I decide to go out and buy a video course that teaches me a language.

It's the same thing with medical care. I don't need to know the details of how to treat a disease, I only need to know how to find a competent physician to treat the disease.

This attempt to confuse health decisions as different from other economic decisions is simply an attempt to hide the real problem. Regressive policies are taking choice away from consumers and putting them in the hands of interventionists. As the economists Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek taught us, such nationalistic planning lowers standards of  living and results inefficiencies that create shortages and misallocations and that's the economics of the situation.  

2 comments:

  1. Just read Krugman's article. It's more proof that socialists hate economics - their entire system is a revolt against economic reality.

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  2. In addition to economics, the laws of gravity and motion also don't apply in the emergency room when a patient is unconscious.

    ReplyDelete