The Economic Way of Thinking About Health Care
22nd February 2015
People often make pronouncements that have profound economic implications without knowing it. They care about ends and are content to leave the means to others. That’s irresponsible, the intellectual equivalent, as I’ve said before, to drunk driving.
Health insurance, whatever it is, does not grow wild and abundant in nature or fall from the sky like manna. It constitutes a command over goods and services—that is, over the products of human effort in conjunction with scarce resources. When government provides health insurance through subsidies or Medicare or Medicaid, it presides over the disposal of the fruits of other people’s labor. Government personnel decide who gets what, even though they had no hand in producing the resources they “redistribute.”