Tuesday, May 1, 2018

It Begins: A Call for Health Care Price Controls in the United States



The Fiscal Times, which is funded by Peter G. Peterson, who is an investment banker and was Secretary of Commerce under the Richard Nixon, is supporting the idea of price controls in the healthcare sector.

From a TFT staff editorial under the title, Making the Case for Health Care Price Controls:
Researchers have found that Medicare pays much less than private insurance for the same medical conditions...And a recent piece by Paul Hewitt and Phillip Longman in Washington Monthly magazine proposes a “single price system” in which Medicare reimbursement rates would be imposed across the health care system. “We need to slow medical spending and relax the pressures on wages and other government programs,” [Robert J.] Samuelson writes. “The recognition of the huge gap between Medicare and private reimbursement rates creates the opportunity to do that. We should take it.”
This proposal, of course, fails to recognize the principle taught in economics 101 that price controls cause shortages and play havoc with supply incentives. And, of course, the TFT editorial does not discuss at all the many regulations that result in high healthcare costs. Nope, it is ignorance of basic economics and right to the socialist "solution,' which will make matters worse.

-Robert Wenzel  






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