American Socialism

[Lemur]

Its helpful to look hard at individual areas and ask, honestly, "Will the market work here?" The benefits of the market are too numerous to go into, but obviously if a field can be served by a functioning market, that's the best solution.

However, there are conditions that must be met for a market to function properly

• Bonding contracts
• Equality of information
• Property rights
• Competition

... etcetera. Lots of elements need to be in place for a market to work.

Americans, as a whole, agree that some things are not appropriate for a market. Policing our communities is not farmed out to the lowest bidder. Fire protection is not shopped between competing firms. Road building, by and large, is not financed by universal toll roads.

There are good reasons for all of these. Take roads, for instance. If I control the road between Huntsville and Janesburg, I have a de facto monopoly, and the only way to create market conditions would be to build alternate roads between the two towns, or to build a tramway, or a dirigible service. This would be insanely wasteful, as well as resulting in, at best, a duopoly rather than a monopoly.

Health care is a bit of a puzzler to this Lemur. It lacks many of the characteristics that allow a market to function. Equality of information? Are you kidding me? What are you gonna do, shop around for a cardiologist with your extensive knowledge of cardiology? How can there ever be a level playing field between a doctor and a patient? Between normal people and drug companies? How you gonna weight the relative value of provaxilcom and lipolizor? Heck, most practicing MDs find it impossible to keep up with the deluge of me-too drugs ...

So on the one hand, health care doesn't lend itself to market functions, as we see every day in the U.S.A.

On the other hand, treating health care as a public service has costs and dangers, as anyone looking at European budgets can attest. There's an innovation cost as well: without the profit motive, medical and drug development slows to a crawl. This is why people with bucks come from other countries to get cutting-edge treatment in the U.S.A. No market, no R&D budgets, no race for cures, no advanced treatment.

So like I said, it's a puzzler. I can see very valid arguments for socialized medicine. And I can see good reasons to embrace free-market medicine. Anything, frankly, would be an improvement on the half-fish half-goat system we have now.