On Health Insurance and Health Care: Some Alternative Perspectives on Reform

The majority of stories in the media these days are naturally reporting, and often times cheerleading, the Obama administration and the Democrat-led congress in their march towards "health insurance/care" reform. Given their control in Washington, aspects of their plan seem inevitable at this point, even while they still debate some of the finer points and negotiate on some details.

In this posting I am going to provide a collection of links to criticisms of this direction, warnings of what is likely to happen if anything akin to what is being proposed are made law. These don't get even a fraction of the media coverage that the plans of the political left do, since they amount to calls for truly free-market reforms -- things that the left despises. So I've been saving up links for a few months, and now want to share them with you as an archive of good material. Several years from now, when most everyone has health coverage, but health care costs are skyrocketing, health care rationing is a reality, health care innovations are in decline, health care trips abroad are increasingly popular, and health freedoms and rights are finally recognized as having been seriously limited by the "reforms of 2009/2010"... you won't be able to think back and say silly things like "Well, the system was broken, we had to do something, and there were no other ideas out there from Republicans or libertarians or Objectivists or anyone else, so we all jumped on the only reform bandwagon in town."

Here are some links to alternative, free-market viewpoints, criticisms of both proposed plans and government plans in states, Canada, Europe, and more. Not meant to be comprehensive, just some highlights from what I've read in the past several months.

• Health Care Reform vs. Universal Health Care (Paul Hsieh, M.D.)
• National Health Preview: The Massachusetts debacle, coming soon to your neighborhood (WSJ)
• Mandatory Health Insurance: Wrong for Massachusetts, Wrong for America (The Objective Standard)
• When Doctors Opt Out: We already know what government-run health care looks like (WSJ)
• The 'Public Plan' Would Be the Only Plan (WSJ)
• Don't Doc American Health Care (Steve Forbes)
• Competition Would Save Medicine, Too (John Stossel)

And then here are more items, all brought my way by We Stand FIRM (Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine), where Paul Hsieh, M.D., provides outstanding analysis and commentary along with the links (original sources he comments on given in parentheses below):

• How US Health Care Stacks Up (IBD)
• Four Myths About Universal Coverage (University of Illinois law professor David Hyman)
• Canadian Cost Controls (Financial Post)
• Gratzer on Socialism and Cancer (David Gratzer, M.D., in The New Atlantic)
• Rhoads: Force is not Competition
• Pipes on Canada (Washington Examiner)
• More Waiting in Massachusetts (Boston Globe)
• Schwartz on MassHealth
• Medicare is Unsustainable
• How ObamaCare Will Affect Your Doctor (WSJ)

Granted, these are all short articles and opinion pieces -- they are not 500-page legislative documents that propose entire health insurance and health care reform packages. But numerous free-market think tanks and advocacy groups have documented such overall reform plans for years (they just aren't of any interest to the majority of leaders in Washington). My purpose in providing this collection of links was just to inform readers of that good alternative thinking does exist in this arena.