Archive for the ‘morality’ Category

How to argue for Health Savings Accounts

Monday, July 21st, 2008

Summary: The best defense of Health Savings Accounts is not that they promote wise spending and bring costs down. It's that they are a step toward a more ethical tax policy. Conservatives, Republicans, and free-market advocates often tout Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) as a means of controlling costs.  Yet, critics of HSAs will ...

Equality and health care

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

Socialist politician Aneurin Bevan, father of Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), has stated that “everyone should be treated alike in the matter of medical care" and that "the essence of a satisfactory health service is that rich and poor are treated alike, that poverty is not a disability and wealth ...

Jefferson, rights, and health care

Friday, July 4th, 2008

In honor of Independence Day, it is appropriate for today's post to concern the primary author of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson.  After all, Patient Power is the health care blog of the Independence Institute. Via a web search, one of the first pages I found was from RightToHealthCare.org, which attempts ...

Dehumanizing doctors

Tuesday, July 1st, 2008

Problem: Doctors may stop seeing Medicare patients because the reimbursement rates are so low. The solution?  At least one blog commenter wants to make Medicare the only game in town so doctors either put up or shut up.  Bloomberg News reports: James King, a doctor in Selmer, Tenn., doesn’t take new Medicare patients. More ...

Nanny-state health care

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

In a previous post I challenged the notion that medical care is like services we receive from the fire department — a flawed analogy to justify politician-controlled single-payer health care.  In it I claim that a more accurate analogy is that medical insurance is like homeowners or renters insurance. Colorado single-payer advocate ...

Is health care like the fire department?

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Last week I challenged the view that health care should be a government service because it is allegedly like police protection.  A similar analogy is to the fire department.  Advocating single-payer health care, Michael Moore tells NPR: That you should not have a private, profit-making insurance company in the middle between ...

Is health care like police protection?

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

"Profit is a perverse incentive for quality health care: imagine for-profit fire or police protection," writes Michelle Swenson in support of single-payer health care.  Louise at Colorado Health Insurance Insider has made the same comparison.  Most notably, Michael Moore has also.  In this post I'll address the police analogy. (I address ...

Open letter to supporters of Colorado SB 160

Monday, June 2nd, 2008

To: Stephen Kapanos, Vice President Public Policy & Advocacy Bill Lindsay and Penfield Tate, Health Care Committee, Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce Elisabeth Arenales, Esq., Director, Health Care Program, Colorado Center on Law and Policy Mental Health America of Colorado, Colorado Center on Law and Policy, and the Denver Metro Chamber of ...

AFL-CIO: Obey My Authority!

Wednesday, May 28th, 2008

Continuation of my critique of the AFL-CIO commentary here and here. In their Denver Post commentary, AFL-CIO executives John Sweeney and Mike Cerbo say that Hillary and Obama are correct to be skeptical of the idea that the market is the right entity to put in charge. Are they saying that the ...

Moral argument for free-market health care

Thursday, May 15th, 2008

In 1946, Ayn Rand wrote a letter to Leonard Read concerning his proposal to establish the Foundation for Economic Education .1 In the letter she explained the importance of making the moral argument for free markets, rather than using arguments from economics and leaving the moral high ground to the ...