22 Days in Paul Krugman's Masterclass (Day 14) (Krugman as a Healthcare Socialist)

Lesson 14 in Paul Krugman's Masterclass is 11 minutes and 55 seconds long.

In this lesson, Krugman continues to discuss healthcare.

His foundational principle is: "Healthcare will not take care of itself" via the free market.

Of course, this is absurd and he knows it.
Even in the US mixed healthcare system, he admits that pretty much everyone is covered except healthy youth.

But he is not satisfied with this, he says there are three options to a better healthcare system, all involving government intervention:

• True socialized medicine, where the government provides all healthcare.
• Health insurance provided by the government, where the private sector provides the actual healthcare.
• Private insurance that is heavily regulated.

Krugman indicates in the lesson that he would be happy with any one of these options but suggests that for political reasons a combination of the three must be rigged up in the United States.

Of course, what Krugman fails to point out is that these government regulated programs create power centers which result in providers not focusing on customers (patients) but on the regulatory bodies, where they will try to out-regulate their competitors.

Krugman knows this is going on now because he points out that the large pharmaceutical companies, insurance companies and hospital sectors all influence how payments are made, and to whom, in the current system.

But he fails to acknowledge that these power centers can be eliminated by stopping the regulation and returning the consumer as king.

Instead, he wants more regulation! That's a socialist for you. Regulation creates cronyism, so let us have more regulation to eliminate the cronyism.

I confronted the king of this kind of thinking, the "architect" of Obamacare, Ezekiel Emanuel, in San Francisco in June 2017.

This is serious cross-wired, elitist thinking. It is the type of elitists who they think are better at knowing what is good for us all and will create a crony dysfunctional system to "prove" they are right. Krugman is one of them.

-RW

Links to discussions of all Krugman's Masterclass lessons are here.

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