Black Market Medicine: An Ethical Alternative to State Control
by Dr. Louis Alphonse Crespo
The Economics of Medical Care
by George Yossif, M.D.
"In voluntary markets, private medicine included, the key knowledge necessary for trade
is conveyed by freely fluctuating prices. The price system conveys knowledge of the
personal and subjective utilities of the actors, that is, of the supply and demand of
various commodities and services, which cannot be compared otherwise. Demand for ordinary
medical care in voluntary markets is highly elastic and medical care by physicians is
largely optional, except for some categories of life-threatening conditions, few in
number and low in incidence, sometimes known as “catastrophic illness.” As history shows,
medical care in essentially voluntary markets tends to be accessible and affordable.
Sustained price inflation in medical care is always a result of direct or indirect
political intervention. The lately much-touted competition between providers is not the
genuine competitive bidding for the satisfaction of the actual consumer of care, the
patient, as a free market would have it. On the contrary, this politically created
competition will further enhance and centralize the bureaucratic controls on medical care,
thus compounding, instead of reducing, the inflationary effects of the multiple and
pervasive political interventions already in operation."
The Economics of Medical Malpractice
May 30, 2006
by Russ Roberts and Alex Tabarrok
"Russ Roberts and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University talk about medical
malpractice, why insurance premiums vary by state, price gouging by insurance
companies, the politics of being a judge and an idea for a new TV show using
a tried-and-true formula: American Victim."
For-Profit Medicine and the Compassion Motive
by Tom G. Palmer
"Profits earned in the context of well-defined and enforced legal rights
(as distinguished from the profits that accrue to being a brilliant thief) may provide
the foundation not of coldness, but of compassion. The search for profit requires that
the doctor consider the interests of the patient by putting himself or herself into the
patient’s position, to imagine the suffering of others, to have compassion. In a
free-market economy, the profit motive may be but another name for the compassion motive."
A Four-Step Health-Care Solution
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and
bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination
of all existing government controls."
Freedom works: Health
November 3, 2007
by Mark Landsbaum
"When people are responsible for the cost of their unhealthy lifestyles, they're more
likely to avoid doing what brings on costly consequences. But when others assume the
cost, people are inclined to engage in riskier behavior. Consequently, many take better
care of their cars than their health."
A Free Market in Human Organs
by Robert Burrage
Free-Market Medicine
August 2002
by Larry Van Heerden
"The health-care market has failed to produce high-quality, low-cost medicine for two
reasons: Consumers are insulated from the cost of medical care by third-party payers,
and information on the performance of competing physicians is not available. Fixing
the incentives and providing consumers with physician performance data will cause
unnecessary surgery to decline, physician performance to improve, disease prevention
to increase, and health-care efficiency to rise."
Free Market Medicine
by James W. Brook
"I am actually a part of a small, but growing, movement of doctors who have
"opted out" of the third-party payment system and simply charge patients directly.
No insurance contracts, no medicare, no medicaid, just direct payment at the time
of service, from the person who receives the service."
Health Care
by Dr. Mary Ruwart
The good doctor answers tough questions about health care in a free society.
Healthcare Without Government
by Joe Peacott
Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It
by Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner
reviewed by Robert L. Ohsfeldt
"a concise and highly readable summary of the evidence refuting the case against
market competition in health care."
Holding Health Care Accountable: Law and the New Medical Marketplace by
E. Haavi Morreim
reviewed by Richard A. Epstein
"In my view, it is a mistake to treat liability for medical mishaps as though it were
a subject of tort law—that is, as a subject for direct judicial or legislative regulation.
All the parties to the health care relationship stand in some consensual arrangement
with each other, either through direct contact or through intermediates. The only way
that incidents such as the bone marrow transplant misadventure will be avoided is for
courts and legislatures to respect and to enforce all contracts among all players in the
health care systems, subject only to the standard contractual defenses of duress, fraud,
and incompetence, which should not be expanded for this occasion."
How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines
7/16/2007
by Robert P. Murphy
"If the government relinquished its role in handling contagious diseases, the public
would be far safer."
If the “Business Model” of Medicine Is Sick, What’s the Diagnosis, and What’s the Cure?
by Robert L. Ohsfeldt
"James P. Whalen is not alone in claiming that the business model of medicine has made
the U.S. health-care system too expensive, inaccessible, inequitable, and mediocre. His
misdiagnosis of what ails American health care, however, leads him to prescribe less of
what the system needs to improve: real competition."
Independent Healthcare: Further Reflections of a Private Doctor
by Dr Robert Lefever
"I suggest that we should re-examine the ideas of our State Health and Welfare
Systems—and incidentally, also our existing private medical system which is largely
parasitic upon the State system—and start again with clear ideas of what we are trying
to achieve and of how it can be done. We should begin by adopting the prime principle
of Capitalism: paying for quality."
New Legal Organ Market
by David Undis
"LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ and tissue donors. Membership
is free, and anybody can join at www.lifesharers.com. Members agree to donate their
organs and tissue when they die, but only to fellow LifeSharers members (unless no member
is a suitable match). LifeSharers members say, in effect, “You can have first dibs on
my organs, but only if you agree to donate yours.” By directing their donations in this
way, LifeSharers members create a pool of organs that are potentially available only to
fellow members."
On a resort island, volunteerism makes a difference.
by Deborah Greensway
Retired physicians in
Hilton Head, SC, give their time to help residents with little or no health insurance.
Private is Better Than Public
by David G. Green
"It is in this sense of de-politicisation that privatisation is a good thing in itself.
It allows the objectives of producers of goods and services to be self-chosen not
politically-chosen."
The Right [that is, the only rational) Way to "Run" a Medical System
by Jan Narveson
"The correct thing to do with the Canadian, or any other top-down medical "system" is
to junk it."
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use by Jacob Sullum
reviewed by Richard Glen Boire
"It is difficult to imagine an open-minded person reading Sullum’s book and coming
away from it without a much more informed understanding of why so many intelligent
people choose to use illegal drugs."
Self-Medicating in Burma
by Kerry Howley
"Freedoms are in short
supply in Burma, a country run by a hardened military, yet the freedom to treat
a bout of food poisoning with pharmaceuticals was new to me. The United States
is the only country in the world that divides drugs into two rigid categories
of prescription-only and over-the-counter. Most other developed nations allow
for a third class of drugs to be dispensed by a pharmacist, and developing
nations typically do not have prescription requirements or fail to enforce
them."
The Rise of Markets and the Fall of Infectious Disease
by Stephen Gold
"True, capitalism is not a magic wand. As the former Communist countries of Europe are
learning, an affluent market economy takes time to develop. Still, if the lesser
developed countries of the world can liberate their economies from government control
and encourage private enterprise, then future generations of children there will look
upon infectious diseases like typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis the way I looked upon
scarlet fever—as a relic of bygone, pre-market days."
A Sales Pitch for Laissez-Faire Health Care
by Daniel B. Klein
"What would it mean to establish liberty of property, consent, and contract in the
area of health care?"
The Healthcare “Crisis” in the USA: An Individualist Anarchist Critique
by Joe Peacott
Heil Health
by Pierre Lemieux
"More than an epithet hurled by defensive couch potatoes, “health Nazi” is a term well
grounded in history, as science historian Robert Proctor illustrates in his remarkable
book, The Nazi War On Cancer. Although Proctor is correct to note that public
health doesn’t imply Nazism, he fails to see that draconian public health laws require
a state apparatus strong enough to crush us."
The Immorality of Government-Mandated Health Care
by Paul A. Cleveland
"National health-care insurance, or its mandated provision, is unjust. It is nothing
more than a forced charity, which is no charity at all. In this vein we might flatter
ourselves into believing that we are doing good works, but it simply is not true. True
mercy is extended as a matter of voluntary choice. It is not forced. Government mandates
which require some to provide for others is false philanthropy. It is fundamentally
selfishness unleashed and it will thwart future prosperity."
The Right to Medical Care
by Sheldon Richman
"All of this is a rather roundabout way of identifying the worst aspect of
the “right to medical care”: the tethering of the citizen to the state. For all the
criticism that is leveled at Medicare and proposals to reform medical care in general,
too little attention has gone to that uncomfortable fact. If government controls
medical spending, it controls you, including the very length of your life."
WPC on health care
A collection of policy briefs and press releases devoted to pointing
out the folly of government socialization of health care,
subsidization, and other market distortions.
National Health Insurance: A Medical Disaster
by Jarret B. Wollstein
"Throughout the world the story is the same: socialized medicine results in skyrocketing
demand for nominally “free” health care, doctors are overburdened, medical services
steadily deteriorate, and there are endless waiting lists for health care. In the
Soviet Union before the collapse of Communism, anesthetics, painkillers, and most drugs
were rationed; 57 percent of hospitals had no hot running water; and it was standard
practice to clean needles with steel wool and reuse them."
What Hunger Insurance Could Teach Us About Health Insurance
by Joseph Bast
"Our fictitious world with hunger insurance reveals how over-reliance on health
insurance is at the very root of our nation’s health-care problems."
Power-Hungry FDA Is Hazardous to Our Health
August 10, 1995
by Robert Higgs
"The FDA forbids the dissemination of information by sellers of nutritional supplements
about many of the potential health benefits of vitamins and minerals. The probable harm
of this censorship is immense -- comparable perhaps to the harm caused by the FDA during
the decades, ending only in the early 1970s, when it prevented sellers from touting the
benefits of foods low in fats and cholesterol."
Does Physician Licensing Serve a Useful Purpose?
July 10, 2000
by Shirley V. Svorny
"Improvements in the incentives for others to monitor physicians due to shifts in
liability, the growth in group practice, and peer review, and the increased ease with
which this monitoring can be performed make state licensing efforts redundant to
market processes."
Harming Our Health
by Mary J. Ruwart
"Licensing of health care services gives us the illusion that we are protected against
selfish others who would defraud us. Instead, our aggression boomerangs back to us,
costing us our wealth, our health, and our very lives."
How and How Not To De-Monopolise Medicine
by Brian Micklethwait
The Physician Shortage: Where To From Here?
by Nadeem Esmail
"The optimal solution to Canada's physician shortage is to remove restrictions on
training, practice, and pricing, and to introduce user charges."
What the World Needs Now Is DDT
by Tina Rosenberg
"The move away from DDT in the 60's and 70's led to a resurgence of malaria in various
countries -- Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Swaziland, South Africa and Belize, to cite a
few; those countries that then returned to DDT saw their epidemics controlled. In Mexico
in the 1980's, malaria cases rose and fell with the quantity of DDT sprayed. Donald
Roberts, a professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in
Bethesda, Md., has argued that when Latin America stopped using DDT in the 1980's, malaria
immediately rose, leading to more than a million extra cases a year. The one country
that continued to beat malaria was Ecuador, the one country that kept using DDT."
The Economics of Organ Donations
June 5, 2006
by Richard Epstein and Russ Roberts
"The kidney people treat the list as though it's a sacred artifact, and, therefore, think
that any effort of designation is an effort to subvert the list and to circumvent some
natural priority—one that they have created."
A Free Market in Kidneys?
by Walter Block
"There is no doubt that those presently responsible for preventing a free market
in kidneys act with the noblest of motives. To them, legalizing the purchase and
sale of human organs would be degrading. Far better, from their viewpoint, that
people donate their bodily parts for free so that thousands of kidney disease
sufferers might live normal lives. However, no matter how benevolent the intentions
of the prohibitionists, it cannot be denied that the effect of their actions has
been to render it less likely that those in need will be served."
A Free Market in Kidneys: Efficient and Equitable
by William Barnett II, Michael Saliba, and Deborah Walker
"The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 prohibits the purchase and sale of kidneys
in the United States even though thousands of Americans die or suffer each year because
of the ban. A free market in kidneys, along with third-party payers, would encourage
kidney donations and give rise to market competition that would increase the quality
of transplants and the transplant process."
A Free Market in Kidneys Would Be Efficient and Equitable: A Case of Too Much Romance
by Michael Brooks
"Barnett, Saliba and Walker have argued that a market for kidneys can be made efficient
and equitable if government acts as a third-party payer-of-last-resort. But because
their analysis rests on an overly romantic view of government, their conclusion—that
the medical shortage would be eliminated and everyone who could benefit from a kidney
transplant would be able to get one—does not hold."
A Free Market for Human Organs
by Megan Clay and Walter Block
Life-Saving Incentives: Consequences, costs and solutions to the organ shortage
April 5, 2004
by Alexander Tabarrok
"In this age of expensive medical care, many people wonder whether financial compensation
for organ donation would be too expensive. In fact, we can save money while saving lives."
We Favor a Freer Market in Kidneys
by William Barnett II, Michael Saliba, and Deborah Walker
"Contra Brooks, the Barnett-Saliba-Walker analysis was not intended to justify the
government’s acting as a payer-of-last-resort. A totally free market in kidneys—one
without government subsides and without the prohibition of sale and purchase of
kidneys, but also without other currently imposed supply-restricting interventions—would
meet Brooks’s efficiency concerns and would be more equitable than the current system."
Economists Against the FDA
September 1, 2000
by Daniel B. Klein
"Economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman have had the unenviable task of pointing
out that popular, well-intentioned cures are often worse than the disease. Economists
seem nasty when they report that the FDA is bad medicine. People don’t like to hear that
they have bought into quackery. In collective decision-making, quackery often prevails
over sense."
The FDA Needs a Big Dose of Economics
October 25, 2002
by Alexander Tabarrok and Daniel B. Klein
"In trying to eliminate bad drugs, the FDA prevents or delays many good drugs from
reaching Americans. Sam Peltzman was one of the first economists to do the grisly math.
His work shows that lives saved by FDA restrictions are few compared with the lives
that would be saved by drugs that would be available if the FDA weren’t blocking the way."
Increasing Access to Pharmaceuticals
by Doug Bandow
"Paternalism remains a powerful influence in Washington. But it is time for patients
and doctors, insurers and hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and device manufacturers,
senior citizens and healthy young people to together say 'No more.'”
Locking Up Life-Saving Drugs
by Kerry Howley
Protecting Ourselves to Death
by Mary J. Ruwart
"By using aggression to avoid medications that harm us, we lose access to life-saving
drugs."
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This page was last updated on January 1, 2008.