Obama Health Care Reform

The laws of economics have not been repealed by the ACA. So how do we assure that all people will have access to good and affordable medical care? By permitting the evolution of a purely voluntary society.

Conservatives claim that the pre-ACA medical system was the “best in the world.” It was their blindness to the corrupt corporatism of that system, with a price inflation that harmed all but the wealthiest, that helped pave the ground for the ACA.

 The radical libertarian position is not the status quo ante, but a radical freeing of society. Freeing the medical and insurance markets means abolishing all privileges provided by the regulatory cartel, which protects politically connected incumbent providers. It means no licensing. It means no FDA or patents. (Entrepreneurs can provide independent certification, like Underwriters Laboratories.) It means no restrictions on mutual-aid societies, which long ago figured out how to provide affordable basic medical care to their working-class members through “lodge practice,” a voluntary institution that state-sponsored organized medicine denigrated and destroyed. It means a blossoming of philanthropy, which in the past provided medical care to the destitute. (Of course, a freed market would have few who are truly destitute. Government makes and keeps people poor.)

Good-faith advocates of the Affordable Care Act or of a single-payer system should see that they can only achieve their humanitarian objectives through freed markets.