What the Left Doesn’t Understand about Health Care Prices
January 21, 2020
News Article
In just about every critique of the U.S. health care system, the subject of prices is front and center. See for example, It’s the Prices Stupid: Why the United States Is So Different from Other Countries and the more recent update.
We pay the highest prices in the world, we are told. There is some truth in that, but there are qualifications you need to know about which I will address below.
So, what do radical progressives want to do about the problem of high prices? They want to nationalize the entire health care system.
The left wants to nationalize health care. But running the entire health care system is difficult.
If that doesn’t sound strange to you, it should. But perhaps you don’t pay a lot of attention to liberal blogs and leftwing thought.
For the most part, the left doesn’t think that any price in any market plays a useful social function. Whenever they decide a price is too high, they call for government intervention to push the price down. If they decide a price is too low, they call for government intervention to push the price up. Because they don’t think prices serve any positive function, they often ignore the unintended and undesirable consequences of intervention.
