Are Medical Markets an Inherent Failure?
August 5, 2009
by William Anderson
"From an economic point of view, a scarce good is a scarce good, whether it is medical
care or sirloin steak. The problem is that government has piled intervention on top of
intervention, and driving up the costs and making care less available in the process.
The “failure” of the present system is a government failure, period."
Black Market Medicine: An Ethical Alternative to State Control
by Dr. Louis Alphonse Crespo
Canada Sees Boom in Private Health Care Business
June 30, 2009
by Molly Line
"Facing long waits and substandard care, a growing number of Canadians are willing to
pay for health treatment, leading to a booming private business in Canada -- a country
often touted as a successful example of a universal health system."
Canada's Private Clinics Surge as Public System Falters
February 28, 2006
by Clifford Krauss
"Last December, provincial health ministers unveiled new targets for cutting wait times,
including four weeks for radiation therapy for cancer patients beginning when doctors
consider them ready for treatment and 26 weeks for hip replacements.
But few experts think that will stop the trend toward privatization."
Can health care function in a free market?
July 23, 2009
by James Leroy Wilson
"That's the paradox: socialism provides the "guarantee" that everyone should get some
food, only it's not enough food; free markets don't make the guarantee that everyone
is fed, but it does produce more than enough food for everyone."
Competition Would Save Medicine, Too
June 10, 2009
by John Stossel
"People assume someone needs to be "in charge" for a medical-care market to work. But
no one needs to be in charge. What philosopher F.A. Hayek called "spontaneous order" and
Adam Smith called "the invisible hand" would make it happen, just as they make it
happen with food and clothing ... if only we got over the foolish belief that health
care is something that must be paid for by someone else."
The Case for Real Health Care Competition:
ObamaCare will restrict choice, not expand it.
August 27, 2009
by John Stossel
"Nobel laureate F.A. Hayek taught that competition is a "discovery procedure." In other
words, the "data" of supply and demand emerge only through the market process.
We need open-ended competition not merely to see which rival is better, but to learn
things we didn't know before and aren't likely to learn any other way."
The Economics of Medical Care
by George Yossif, M.D.
"In voluntary markets, private medicine included, the key knowledge necessary for trade
is conveyed by freely fluctuating prices. The price system conveys knowledge of the
personal and subjective utilities of the actors, that is, of the supply and demand of
various commodities and services, which cannot be compared otherwise. Demand for ordinary
medical care in voluntary markets is highly elastic and medical care by physicians is
largely optional, except for some categories of life-threatening conditions, few in
number and low in incidence, sometimes known as “catastrophic illness.” As history shows,
medical care in essentially voluntary markets tends to be accessible and affordable.
Sustained price inflation in medical care is always a result of direct or indirect
political intervention. The lately much-touted competition between providers is not the
genuine competitive bidding for the satisfaction of the actual consumer of care, the
patient, as a free market would have it. On the contrary, this politically created
competition will further enhance and centralize the bureaucratic controls on medical care,
thus compounding, instead of reducing, the inflationary effects of the multiple and
pervasive political interventions already in operation."
The Economics of Medical Malpractice
May 30, 2006
by Russ Roberts and Alex Tabarrok
"Russ Roberts and Alex Tabarrok of George Mason University talk about medical
malpractice, why insurance premiums vary by state, price gouging by insurance
companies, the politics of being a judge and an idea for a new TV show using
a tried-and-true formula: American Victim."
For-Profit Medicine and the Compassion Motive
by Tom G. Palmer
"Profits earned in the context of well-defined and enforced legal rights
(as distinguished from the profits that accrue to being a brilliant thief) may provide
the foundation not of coldness, but of compassion. The search for profit requires that
the doctor consider the interests of the patient by putting himself or herself into the
patient’s position, to imagine the suffering of others, to have compassion. In a
free-market economy, the profit motive may be but another name for the compassion motive."
A Four-Step Health-Care Solution
April 1993
by Hans-Hermann Hoppe
"To cure the problem requires not different or more government regulations and
bureaucracies, as self-serving politicians want us to believe, but the elimination
of all existing government controls."
Freedom works: Health
November 3, 2007
by Mark Landsbaum
"When people are responsible for the cost of their unhealthy lifestyles, they're more
likely to avoid doing what brings on costly consequences. But when others assume the
cost, people are inclined to engage in riskier behavior. Consequently, many take better
care of their cars than their health."
A Free Market in Human Organs
by Robert Burrage
Free-Market Medicine
August 2002
by Larry Van Heerden
"The health-care market has failed to produce high-quality, low-cost medicine for two
reasons: Consumers are insulated from the cost of medical care by third-party payers,
and information on the performance of competing physicians is not available. Fixing
the incentives and providing consumers with physician performance data will cause
unnecessary surgery to decline, physician performance to improve, disease prevention
to increase, and health-care efficiency to rise."
Free Market Medicine
by James W. Brook
"I am actually a part of a small, but growing, movement of doctors who have
"opted out" of the third-party payment system and simply charge patients directly.
No insurance contracts, no medicare, no medicaid, just direct payment at the time
of service, from the person who receives the service."
Healing America: The Free Market Instead of Government Health Care
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.
"We got ourselves into our current dilemma by trying to repeal the laws of economics, and
now we are trying to cope with it by repealing the laws of ethics. We must not ignore the
fact that all of this rhetoric about the “universal right to health care” has very serious
implications. Being covered by health insurance by no means guarantees you medical care.
On the contrary, the more medicine is socialized, the less medical care you can count on
receiving. If you have the right to all the health care that society determines you are
entitled to but cannot afford to provide, that means that you have no right to live."
Health Care
by Dr. Mary Ruwart
The good doctor answers tough questions about health care in a free society.
Healthcare and Insurance on a Desert Island
October 23, 2009
by Gilbert G. Berdine, M.D.
"Consider an idyllic island where there is more food and water available than what is
needed by the inhabitants for sustenance. Consider, also, that there is no contact with
the outside world, so this island is a closed system. For simplicity, the food source
will be fish in the surrounding ocean and the water source is a lake sustained by
rainfall."
Health Care’s New Entrepreneurs
by Paul Howard
"Innovators are bringing consumer-oriented medicine to market, with promising results."
Healthcare Without Government
by Joe Peacott
Healthy Competition: What’s Holding Back Health Care and How to Free It
by Michael F. Cannon and Michael D. Tanner
reviewed by Robert L. Ohsfeldt
"a concise and highly readable summary of the evidence refuting the case against
market competition in health care."
Holding Health Care Accountable: Law and the New Medical Marketplace by
E. Haavi Morreim
reviewed by Richard A. Epstein
"In my view, it is a mistake to treat liability for medical mishaps as though it were
a subject of tort law—that is, as a subject for direct judicial or legislative regulation.
All the parties to the health care relationship stand in some consensual arrangement
with each other, either through direct contact or through intermediates. The only way
that incidents such as the bone marrow transplant misadventure will be avoided is for
courts and legislatures to respect and to enforce all contracts among all players in the
health care systems, subject only to the standard contractual defenses of duress, fraud,
and incompetence, which should not be expanded for this occasion."
How the Free Market Would Handle Quarantines
7/16/2007
by Robert P. Murphy
"If the government relinquished its role in handling contagious diseases, the public
would be far safer."
If the “Business Model” of Medicine Is Sick, What’s the Diagnosis, and What’s the Cure?
by Robert L. Ohsfeldt
"James P. Whalen is not alone in claiming that the business model of medicine has made
the U.S. health-care system too expensive, inaccessible, inequitable, and mediocre. His
misdiagnosis of what ails American health care, however, leads him to prescribe less of
what the system needs to improve: real competition."
Independent Healthcare: Further Reflections of a Private Doctor
by Dr Robert Lefever
"I suggest that we should re-examine the ideas of our State Health and Welfare
Systems—and incidentally, also our existing private medical system which is largely
parasitic upon the State system—and start again with clear ideas of what we are trying
to achieve and of how it can be done. We should begin by adopting the prime principle
of Capitalism: paying for quality."
A Libertarian's No-Nonsense Health Care Reform Proposal
August 20, 2009
by EJ Moosa
"Is it really so difficult to improve health care in America? Here is a series of
proposals that John Galt would approve in a heartbeat."
The Market Doesn’t Ration Health Care
August 7, 2009
by Sheldon Richman
"I am not denying that economic goods are by definition scarce and that at any given
time we must settle for less of them than we want. I am also not denying that the
marketplace is relevant in determining who gets how much of those scarce goods.
I am denying that this is appropriately called 'rationing.'”
Markets, Not Mandates:
How medical markets would improve health care and reduce costs
July 28, 2009
by Ronald Bailey
"Why bother outlining a vision of how market reforms of health care might play out?
Perhaps the impending collapse of top-down reform proposals will open up a policy
discussion about how markets can improve health care and reduce its costs. One can
dream, anyway."
New Legal Organ Market
by David Undis
"LifeSharers is a non-profit voluntary network of organ and tissue donors. Membership
is free, and anybody can join at www.lifesharers.com. Members agree to donate their
organs and tissue when they die, but only to fellow LifeSharers members (unless no member
is a suitable match). LifeSharers members say, in effect, “You can have first dibs on
my organs, but only if you agree to donate yours.” By directing their donations in this
way, LifeSharers members create a pool of organs that are potentially available only to
fellow members."
On a resort island, volunteerism makes a difference.
by Deborah Greensway
Retired physicians in
Hilton Head, SC, give their time to help residents with little or no health insurance.
The Overlooked Solution for Health Care
August 14, 2009
by Sheldon Richman
"Anyone who thinks that the free-market solution means doing nothing is either ignorant
or dishonest. Sorry, I see no other alternative. It doesn’t take much looking to see
that we have nothing like a free market in medical services and insurance. Insisting we
do is an effective way to assure that the free market is never considered as an
alternative to the current State-ridden system."
Private is Better Than Public
by David G. Green
"It is in this sense of de-politicisation that privatisation is a good thing in itself.
It allows the objectives of producers of goods and services to be self-chosen not
politically-chosen."
A Pure Free Market in Medical Services:
What Government Could Do to Help Our Health
July 29, 2009
by Fred E. Foldvary
"Economic theory points to a pure free market providing the most productive and equitable
economy and therefore medical services. Central planners lack the knowledge to
efficiently allocate resources, and politics skews the outcome towards special interests.
Here are the reforms need to have a really free market in medical services:"
The Right [that is, the only rational) Way to "Run" a Medical System
by Jan Narveson
"The correct thing to do with the Canadian, or any other top-down medical "system" is
to junk it."
A Sales Pitch for Laissez-Faire Health Care
July 1995
By Daniel B. Klein
"What would it mean to establish liberty of property, consent, and contract in the area
of health care?"
Saying Yes: In Defense of Drug Use by Jacob Sullum
reviewed by Richard Glen Boire
"It is difficult to imagine an open-minded person reading Sullum’s book and coming
away from it without a much more informed understanding of why so many intelligent
people choose to use illegal drugs."
Self-Medicating in Burma
by Kerry Howley
"Freedoms are in short
supply in Burma, a country run by a hardened military, yet the freedom to treat
a bout of food poisoning with pharmaceuticals was new to me. The United States
is the only country in the world that divides drugs into two rigid categories
of prescription-only and over-the-counter. Most other developed nations allow
for a third class of drugs to be dispensed by a pharmacist, and developing
nations typically do not have prescription requirements or fail to enforce
them."
The Rise of Markets and the Fall of Infectious Disease
by Stephen Gold
"True, capitalism is not a magic wand. As the former Communist countries of Europe are
learning, an affluent market economy takes time to develop. Still, if the lesser
developed countries of the world can liberate their economies from government control
and encourage private enterprise, then future generations of children there will look
upon infectious diseases like typhus, cholera, and tuberculosis the way I looked upon
scarlet fever—as a relic of bygone, pre-market days."
A Sales Pitch for Laissez-Faire Health Care
by Daniel B. Klein
"What would it mean to establish liberty of property, consent, and contract in the
area of health care?"
The Whole Foods Alternative to ObamaCare
by John Mackay
"While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive
new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new
unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care
system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite
direction – toward less government control and more individual empowerment. Here are
eight reforms that would greatly lower the cost of health care for everyone:"
Do We Need State Control of Medical Care?
Government-run health care cannot eliminate scarcity
July 1, 2009
by William Anderson
"From the huge regulatory burdens (with accompanying paperwork) on medical people to
the third-party payments, government actions on all fronts have turned medical care
into something akin to a Rube Goldberg cartoon."
National Health Care: Medicine in Germany 1918-1945
November 1993
by Marc S. Micozzi M.D.
"Politicized medicine is not a sufficient cause of the mass extermination of human
beings, but it seems to be a necessary cause. The Nazi Holocaust did not happen for some
inexplicable German reason; it is not an event that we can afford to ignore because we
are not Germans or not Nazis. The history of Germany from 1914 to 1945 is a telescoping
of modernity from monarchy, war, and collapse to democracy and the welfare state, and
finally to dictatorship, war, and death."
Nationalized Health Care Will Cut Costs? It Just Ain’t So!
January 2004
by Gene Callahan and Robert Murphy
"Our preferred solution is a true free market in health care, one where anyone is
permitted to provide any service he wishes, with consumers free to evaluate providers.
But, indoctrinated with the notion that it is only government licensing that protects
us from quacks, many Americans consider it absurd to argue that everyone should be
legally allowed to practice medicine."
Pelosi/Obamacare: The Worst Bill Ever
November 11, 2009
by Peter Ferrara
"But even this label doesn’t fully communicate the outright assault on the American
people involved in this legislation. The bill is not only a serious threat to your
freedom and prosperity, but to your very life as well."
The Tragedy of Health Insurance:
How the insurance industry has haplessly abetted the rise of
a government-run health care system
October 27, 2009
by Ronald Bailey
"Given these mandated barriers, insurance companies have found that the easiest way to
enter to a new state is to buy another company that is already operating in the market.
It is this dynamic that is driving the trend toward consolidation in health insurance
markets."
Do No Harm
by Jane M. Orient, M.D.
"If government forces us all into a bureaucratically managed system, we will still
have something called “health care,” delivered by persons called “health care
providers.” But such a system will have no place for ethical physicians, whose Oath
forbids them to accept a situation of conflict of interest with their patients."
Government Medicine
June 26, 2009
by Bob Murphy
"The way to fix health care is to get the government out of it. The same goes for
every other "problem area" in society today."
The Healthcare “Crisis” in the USA: An Individualist Anarchist Critique
by Joe Peacott
The Health Plan's Devilish Principles
by Murray N. Rothbard
"Murray wrote against Hillary's fascisticare in 1994; his article is just as relevant
to Obama's commiecare in 2009."
Heil Health
by Pierre Lemieux
"More than an epithet hurled by defensive couch potatoes, “health Nazi” is a term well
grounded in history, as science historian Robert Proctor illustrates in his remarkable
book, The Nazi War On Cancer. Although Proctor is correct to note that public
health doesn’t imply Nazism, he fails to see that draconian public health laws require
a state apparatus strong enough to crush us."
The Immorality of Government-Mandated Health Care
by Paul A. Cleveland
"National health-care insurance, or its mandated provision, is unjust. It is nothing
more than a forced charity, which is no charity at all. In this vein we might flatter
ourselves into believing that we are doing good works, but it simply is not true. True
mercy is extended as a matter of voluntary choice. It is not forced. Government mandates
which require some to provide for others is false philanthropy. It is fundamentally
selfishness unleashed and it will thwart future prosperity."
Insuring Health
August 18, 2009
by Jim Davies
"Yes, politicians are malevolent or stupid, most likely the former in my view, but
everyone who votes for them is complicit, up to his neck, actively taking part in the
most humongous act of armed robbery in the history of man. That is not "insurance"--a
perfectly sound idea involving the voluntary sharing of the risk of heavy but
unpredictable loss--this is theft, neither more nor less. That is the real, moral disease
that has infected the core of this society and no amount of medical care is going to
cure it."
Involuntary Medical Servitude
August 26, 2009
by Maria Martins
"If the exercise of a patient's so-called "right" to healthcare imposes obligations on
taxpayers to pay for it and healthcare practitioners to provide it, then it is not a
right, but an attempt to enslave one part of the population for the benefit of another
part."
Redistributing Health
October 12, 2009
by Alan Reynolds
"Proponents of compulsory, government-designed health insurance can't seem to
understand why others disagree. Perhaps the public is realizing that these proposals
are fundamentally about redistributing health?"
Slavery Is Not Freedom
October 19, 2009
by Paul Jacob
"There is one fact about the health care “reform” legislation being debated in
Washington, DC, that is unavoidable. The fact that it is coercive."
Socialized Health Care: The Communist Dream and the Soviet Reality
by Anna Ebeling
"Connections, bribes, class, gender, and ethnicity heavily determined who were admitted
into and graduated from medical schools throughout the Soviet Union. Thus the supplies
of hospitals, physicians, medical equipment, and pharmaceuticals all became victims of
socialist central planning and political priorities just like everything else in the
“workers’ paradise.” At the end of the 20th century, Russia was infamous for having one
of the worst health-care systems in the world."
Socialized Medicine Is the Problem
December 2001
by Walter Block
"Some people think there is something special about medical care. There is not. Yes,
if we do not avail ourselves of it, we will be in dire straits. But no less can be said
for food, clothing, shelter, energy, transportation—you name it. And economic law, just
as in the case of chemistry or physics, is no respecter of how important an industry is
to human well-being; it works just the same in medical services as for paper clips or
rubber bands. Impose artificially lower prices in a market—let alone virtually zero
prices as in medicine—and you guarantee a shortage."
Veterans First on Health Care
June 24, 2009
by Ray Nothstine
"The government needs to prove it can handle existing obligations before proposing the
adoption of any universal government plan. If it cannot handle the challenge of caring
for 8 million veterans, how will a government bureaucracy manage a system dealing with
300 million Americans?"
War (On Your Health) Is The Health Of The State
Jun 12, 2009
by Thomas L. Knapp
"The correlation between government intervention in health care and the increasing cost
of health care is close enough that graphs for the two phenomena are virtually
interchangeable."
What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us
August 21, 2009
by Yuri N. Maltsev
"Most countries enslaved by the Soviet empire moved out of a fully socialized system
through privatization and insuring competition in the healthcare system. Others,
including many European social democracies, intend to privatize the healthcare system
in the long run and decentralize medical control. The private ownership of hospitals
and other units is seen as a critical determining factor of the new, more efficient, and
humane system."
WPC on health care
A collection of policy briefs and press releases devoted to pointing
out the folly of government socialization of health care,
subsidization, and other market distortions.
Philosophy of Immunization
by Mark Moyers, D.C.
"Ninety-eight percent of all persons immunized under compulsory immunization laws never
object! They don't know how! They don't know that they can! They don't know that they
might want to, or why!"
Health Care Hysteria
July 21, 2009
by Thomas Sowell
"We are like someone being rushed by a used car dealer to sign on the dotted line. But
getting stuck with a car that is a lemon is nothing compared to signing away your right
to decide what medical care you or your loved ones will get in life and death situations."
Hello Dr. State
by Ron Paul
"Madam Speaker, today I am introducing the Coercion is Not Health Care Act. This
legislation forbids the federal government from forcing any American to purchase
health insurance, and from conditioning participation in any federal program, or
receipt of any federal benefit, on the purchase of health insurance."
How Government Destroys Medical Care
February 2005
by Steven Greenhut
"The law is simple: No one may be turned away from a hospital, unless the hospital does
not offer the specific services needed. Everyone must be served for free. As a result,
California’s poor and uninsured often rely on emergency rooms as their mainstay for
health care. They go for immunizations, check-ups, sniffles, anything. No payment
required. This is a function of federal law, but the high uninsured, immigrant
population in Los Angeles, combined with other state laws has made this Ground Zero
for the health-care crisis."
In Health Care, Nobody Knows Anything:
Two new industry studies reignite the debate about what makes health care so expensive.
October 20, 2009
by Ronald Bailey
"There is one thing that everybody should know when it comes to health care: Competition
in markets tends to lower prices and improve quality over time. It can do so in health
care markets as well."
The Insanity of "Universal" Medical Care
July 29, 2009
by William Anderson
"Americans do not need to destroy their healthcare system in order to "save" it. There
is another path we can take, one in which we restore the free market and get the
government out of the healthcare business altogether. Soon enough, this system would be
the envy of the world, but it seems that the envy of the political classes is such that
free markets in medical care are not in the political cards."
Insuring You Won't Cut Costs
July 08, 2009
by John Stossel
"Health care "reformers" keep talking about getting us more health insurance. Then they
talk about cutting costs. This is contradictory nonsense."
Medical Technology and the State
May 2002
by Gary M. Pecquet
"Countries with nationalized health care, such as Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom,
spend much less on medical care than the United States (only 7–10 percent of GDP compared
to 14 percent in the United States).7 This is not because the government is more
cost-effective than health-care markets, but because there is little innovation under a
nationalized system. By restricting technological advances and cutting the quality of
medical care to the bone, socialized medicine can offer lunchbox medical care to everyone,
but even then routine office visits and surgeries often require waiting in long lines."
National Health Insurance: A Medical Disaster
October 1992
by Jarret B. Wollstein
"Throughout the world the story is the same: socialized medicine results in
skyrocketing demand for nominally “free” health care, doctors are overburdened, medical
services steadily deteriorate, and there are endless waiting lists for health care."
National Socialist Fascist Communist Healthcare
August 1, 2009
by Bill Huff
"Without the AMA monopoly, and the symbiosis between doctors, Big Pharma, the FDA,
and other unconstitutional government agencies, Free Medicine might truly be free to
achieve its highest and noblest aspirations."
What Hunger Insurance Could Teach Us About Health Insurance
by Joseph Bast
"Our fictitious world with hunger insurance reveals how over-reliance on health
insurance is at the very root of our nation’s health-care problems."
The Health-Insurance Market Is Not Free
September 29, 2009
by Anton Batey
"For instance, in Idaho, Maine, Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, Rhode Island,
and Vermont, there are regulations called "guaranteed issues." These force insurance
companies to accept all comers, regardless of preexisting conditions."
Proposed cure for world’s health:
Worse than the disease
November 22, 2004
by Philip Stevens
"Meanwhile, if governments really care about improving the health of the poor they
should remove the barriers they put in the way of economic development and access
to medicines."
Power-Hungry FDA Is Hazardous to Our Health
August 10, 1995
by Robert Higgs
"The FDA forbids the dissemination of information by sellers of nutritional supplements
about many of the potential health benefits of vitamins and minerals. The probable harm
of this censorship is immense -- comparable perhaps to the harm caused by the FDA during
the decades, ending only in the early 1970s, when it prevented sellers from touting the
benefits of foods low in fats and cholesterol."
Does Physician Licensing Serve a Useful Purpose?
July 10, 2000
by Shirley V. Svorny
"Improvements in the incentives for others to monitor physicians due to shifts in
liability, the growth in group practice, and peer review, and the increased ease with
which this monitoring can be performed make state licensing efforts redundant to
market processes."
Harming Our Health
by Mary J. Ruwart
"Licensing of health care services gives us the illusion that we are protected against
selfish others who would defraud us. Instead, our aggression boomerangs back to us,
costing us our wealth, our health, and our very lives."
How and How Not To De-Monopolise Medicine
by Brian Micklethwait
Medical Licensing: An Obstacle to Affordable, Quality Care
September 17, 2008
by Shirley Svorny
". . . I argue here that licensure not only fails to protect consumers from incompetent
physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, makes health care more expensive and
less accessible."
The Physician Shortage: Where To From Here?
by Nadeem Esmail
"The optimal solution to Canada's physician shortage is to remove restrictions on
training, practice, and pricing, and to introduce user charges."
What the World Needs Now Is DDT
by Tina Rosenberg
"The move away from DDT in the 60's and 70's led to a resurgence of malaria in various
countries -- Sri Lanka, Madagascar, Swaziland, South Africa and Belize, to cite a
few; those countries that then returned to DDT saw their epidemics controlled. In Mexico
in the 1980's, malaria cases rose and fell with the quantity of DDT sprayed. Donald
Roberts, a professor at the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in
Bethesda, Md., has argued that when Latin America stopped using DDT in the 1980's, malaria
immediately rose, leading to more than a million extra cases a year. The one country
that continued to beat malaria was Ecuador, the one country that kept using DDT."
Medical Marijuana: The Real Stakes
December 16, 2004
by Jeff Jacoby
"Ashcroft v. Raich, the Supreme Court's medical marijuana case, isn't really about
medical marijuana. It's about power -- the power of Congress to exert control, and the
power of the Constitution to rein Congress in."
The Economics of Organ Donations
June 5, 2006
by Richard Epstein and Russ Roberts
"The kidney people treat the list as though it's a sacred artifact, and, therefore, think
that any effort of designation is an effort to subvert the list and to circumvent some
natural priority—one that they have created."
A Free Market in Kidneys: Efficient and Equitable
by William Barnett II, Michael Saliba, and Deborah Walker
"The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 prohibits the purchase and sale of kidneys
in the United States even though thousands of Americans die or suffer each year because
of the ban. A free market in kidneys, along with third-party payers, would encourage
kidney donations and give rise to market competition that would increase the quality
of transplants and the transplant process."
A Free Market in Kidneys Would Be Efficient and Equitable: A Case of Too Much Romance
by Michael Brooks
"Barnett, Saliba and Walker have argued that a market for kidneys can be made efficient
and equitable if government acts as a third-party payer-of-last-resort. But because
their analysis rests on an overly romantic view of government, their conclusion—that
the medical shortage would be eliminated and everyone who could benefit from a kidney
transplant would be able to get one—does not hold."
A Free Market for Human Organs
by Megan Clay and Walter Block
Fresh Kidneys for Sale:
International organ markets aren't the same as slave markets.
October 13, 2009
by Ronald Bailey
"By prohibiting the development of legal markets in human organs, the United Nations
is ultimately forcing more desperately poor people who wish to sell their organs into
black markets, penalizing them for their poverty, and implying that they lack the ability
to make rational decisions about what to do with their bodies. Paternalism is bad enough,
but banning organ markets is ineffective and counterproductive paternalism at its worst."
Life-Saving Incentives: Consequences, costs and solutions to the organ shortage
April 5, 2004
by Alexander Tabarrok
"In this age of expensive medical care, many people wonder whether financial compensation
for organ donation would be too expensive. In fact, we can save money while saving lives."
We Favor a Freer Market in Kidneys
by William Barnett II, Michael Saliba, and Deborah Walker
"Contra Brooks, the Barnett-Saliba-Walker analysis was not intended to justify the
government’s acting as a payer-of-last-resort. A totally free market in kidneys—one
without government subsides and without the prohibition of sale and purchase of
kidneys, but also without other currently imposed supply-restricting interventions—would
meet Brooks’s efficiency concerns and would be more equitable than the current system."
Economists Against the FDA
September 1, 2000
by Daniel B. Klein
"Economists from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman have had the unenviable task of pointing
out that popular, well-intentioned cures are often worse than the disease. Economists
seem nasty when they report that the FDA is bad medicine. People don’t like to hear that
they have bought into quackery. In collective decision-making, quackery often prevails
over sense."
The FDA Needs a Big Dose of Economics
October 25, 2002
by Alexander Tabarrok and Daniel B. Klein
"In trying to eliminate bad drugs, the FDA prevents or delays many good drugs from
reaching Americans. Sam Peltzman was one of the first economists to do the grisly math.
His work shows that lives saved by FDA restrictions are few compared with the lives
that would be saved by drugs that would be available if the FDA weren’t blocking the way."
FDA's Bad Medicine
June 17, 2009
by Gregory Conko, Jerome Arnett
"In his first two months, Sharfstein's FDA has threatened to regulate Cheerios as
a drug because its label says it can help lower your cholesterol and proposed action
against drug companies because Google Internet searches for their products don't show
enough safety information."
FDA Seeks to Ban Pyridoxamine
by William Faloon
"The FDA's twisted position is that if vitamin companies can offer low-cost
pyridoxamine supplements, then there is no incentive for a drug
company to invest hundreds of millions of dollars getting it approved
as a prescription drug. Said differently, to protect the financial
interests of a pharmaceutical company, the FDA is willing to deny
every health-conscious American access to the life-saving benefits of
pyridoxamine, which include preventing the very disease the drug
company is seeking to have pyridoxamine approved to treat!"
Increasing Access to Pharmaceuticals
by Doug Bandow
"Paternalism remains a powerful influence in Washington. But it is time for patients
and doctors, insurers and hospitals, pharmaceutical firms and device manufacturers,
senior citizens and healthy young people to together say 'No more.'”
Locking Up Life-Saving Drugs
by Kerry Howley
"Prescription laws make us sicker and poorer."
Protecting Ourselves to Death
by Mary J. Ruwart
"By using aggression to avoid medications that harm us, we lose access to life-saving
drugs."
A World Without the FDA
September 1999
by Russell Roberts
"Would a world without an FDA and prescriptions be a better world? The answer depends on
how many lives would be lost from mistakes and how many lives would be saved by the wider
and earlier availability of drugs. It would also depend on the value you place on putting
responsibility in our own hands rather than having the government take responsibility for
us."
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This page was last updated on November 20, 2009.