Student Publications
University of Houston
151C Communications Bldg
Houston, TX 77204-4015
713.743.5350

©1991-2007
Student Publications,
All rights reserved.

Last modified:

Contact:
ktruitt@uh.edu

Opinion

‘Universal' health care destroys free market

Monica Granger 
Opinion Columnist

The Washington Post first broke the story to national clamor on Feb. 18, but it should not come as a surprise -- especially to economists. The truth behind the gross malfeasance at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, the pinnacle of the American government's network of care for returning war veterans since 1909, is that central planning cannot replace the discipline of free market incentives. America should take heed to a key issue in the 2008 presidential elections: government-run health care, known as "universal" health care.

The most effective of free-market incentives is the profit motive. It compels businesses to be fiscally responsible, stay attuned to consumer demands and seek entrepreneurial innovations delivering competitive advantages. In these endeavors in an unhampered market, private businesses (and their investors) take on both risks and returns accruing from marketplace activity.

When public-sector power mongers control the profit incentive -- for example, when corporations turn to government rather than private markets to make profits -- consumers lose control of who profits as politicians and the interests they cater to quickly discover they can use the coercive state apparatus to redirect gains to themselves at our expense. 

Government has no incentive to be fiscally responsible since it can steal -- or tax.

The primary way in which government infringes on healthcare came in the early twentieth century when the American Medical Association commissioned through the Carnegie Foundation Abraham Flexner's report on "Medical Education in the United States and Canada." 

Guild organizations, such as cartels, are sustainable if and only if they are coercively enforced (like the mafia). Guild and cartel members in free markets face too strong an incentive to break from non-market induced strictures, thereby gaining windfalls by providing more goods or services at a lower price than guild or cartel preferences.

Flexner was not a health professional but he towed the AMA line and called for strictures based on who could practice and what they could practice. At the time, a battle was still raging between practitioners of allopathic and homeopathic medicine, two methods of treating disease by using agents producing effects, respectively, different from or similar to those of the disease itself. 

Now many homeopathic and herbal remedies barred from market competition by pro-AMA legislation are now returning, to great consumer relief. 

Another interesting aspect of health education during this time was the numbers of blacks and women going to school and competing in the health care sector -- yet another reason the AMA wanted to exert control over who could and could not call themselves "Doctor."

Health care is not a right, as there is no right that simultaneously forces another to provide it. One's right to life does not legitimate stealing from and enslaving others to provide it, which is precisely what government-run health care does when it coerces Joe into paying for Sally's self-inflicted emphysema or Bob's hereditary illness. 

This is Part 1 of a four-part series concerning health care.

Granger, an economics/political science senior, 
can be reached via dccampus@mail.uh.edu