Marketplace Intervention By The State Causes Healthcare Inflation

Mandeville, LA – Exclusive Transcript – Who is to say, without government mandate that a health insurance company must cover this, cover mental health, cover reproductive services, hangnails, whatever else they say you must cover, who is to say that any of the things that prolong life or are beneficial to the human condition and to our health are based on the price mechanism?  The only way you would develop these things is if people could afford to pay for them.  Check out today’s transcript for the rest…

 

Begin Mike Church Show Transcript

Mike:  Richard in Indiana, you’re next on The Mike Church Show on a Wednesday.  How you doing?

Caller Richard:  Hey, Mike, great show.  [mocking] “What I’m really saying there, son, is we want to create another inept department like the TSA.”  Come on.  These people like to blow things up when things like this happen.  They can’t take care of the borders.  The best informed citizen and the best protected citizen is the armed citizen.  They can’t see it that way.

Mike:  Right.

Caller Richard:  They talk about the cities.  I think the cities and the states should have their own protection.  If you get a Super Bowl or a World Series, something like that can be pretty well contained.  What about the Thanksgiving Day parades or out in Pasadena or New York with the gay pride parade?  How are they going to really work and contain something like that?  I think they should be left to their own devices.

Mike:  Can you just imagine if there’s that kind of heightened security at a gay pride parade?  Can you just imagine the fallout?  [mocking] “Why are they targeting the gays?  Why are they picking on us?  We don’t need the Feds to run our little parade here, now do we?”

Caller Richard:  Exactly.  They’re a bunch of hypocrites.  I had a question on the Obamacare.  All they’re doing is offering excuses and passes to all these Muslims, people like Farrakhan.  On the other hand, they’re forcing Catholics to pay for the whatchamacallit?

Mike:  Birth control.  They’re not really.  The Catholic Church and the Catholic charities and the hospitals and what have you don’t have to offer.  It’s their choice to offer health insurance as part of the “benefit” package.  They could just stop offering the health care and say: We’re not going to offer healthcare anymore.  Go out and buy your own.  That way we’re not purchasing birth control services or abortifacients.  There’s a simple way to get around that.  No one is compelling — although they soon will I suspect — anyone to purchase health insurance on behalf of their employees, which is a discussion for another entire day.

If you want to trace down the rise in the cost of medical services and the medical services industry, go back to when the federal government got involved in it with the Medicare Act of 1965 or 1966, I want to say.  Then follow that up in ‘67 and ‘68 with the Medicaid Act.  As soon as they began purchasing medical services without a market mechanism to control said purchase — government can’t control that.  Government is going to tax people.  That’s not a price mechanism; that’s a confiscation mechanism.  There’s no if you profited this year, give us x-amount of your profits as part of your tax.  When it comes out of your income or your wage, it’s taken out off the top: We took out x-amount because we have to purchase health services for indigents and the elderly.  Then just look at the cost curve.  All you have to do is put pen to paper — you don’t even have to do that.  All you have to do is put eyeball to what has already been printed on paper, or eyeball to what has already been calculated on computer screen.  You will find that the cost curve, the government spending curve is a nice precursor of private spending when it comes to medical services.

I’ve talked about this before.  Who is to say that in a market that has no government subsidy to it whatsoever, who is to say that a heart transplant doesn’t cost $7,500 instead of $750,000?  Who is to say, without government mandate that a health insurance company must cover this, cover mental health, cover reproductive services, hangnails, whatever else they say you must cover, who is to say that any of the things that prolong life or are beneficial to the human condition and to our health are based on the price mechanism?  The only way you would develop these things is if people could afford to pay for them.

Why am I the only one that thinks like this?  I can’t be alone.  Would the personal computer have ever been adopted at the rate that it was if it was unaffordable and beyond the reach of the consumers that ultimately all wanted to have one?  The answer is no.  Just imagine if we had MacCare.  You don’t have a computer?  The government will buy you one.  Just imagine that.  If you had to compete in a private market with a voracious buyer or consumer like government that knows no bounds to the amount of money it can either borrow or tax, so of course you can have massive distortion in the price mechanism.  If you have distortions in the price mechanism, then you’re going to have inflation.  Look at everything they have touched.  Education, look at the inflation there.  These things are all related.  They’re not unrelated; they are related.  If you want to deal with these things, then deal with what entity it is that is causing the inflation in those markets.

End Mike Church Show Transcript