This article by John Goodman, a noted commentator on health care issues, makes many of the points I’ve discussed with clients over the years. It’s an excellent treatise on why true competition in the delivery of health care would result in lower prices.

I’d add one thing: federal health care spending is a major cause of the exorbitant prices charged for health care, as the federal government simply imposes a price control on itself and passes the unpaid costs on to you, the insured consumer. By demanding that care be provided at below the cost to produce it, the federal government is essentially imposing an ever escalating tax on anyone who has insurance and then forcing you to pay it. This of course leads to the scenario that we see all around us: insurers, forced to cover the “hydraulics” of cost shifting, charge higher and higher premiums, while the federal government ratchets down what they pay for care, further exacerbating the premium crisis, and then, lo and behold, the government announces that it’s the solution to the crisis – a crisis that they created and compound every day.

I submit that the federal government should get out of the health care industry all together. States do a far better job of administering social welfare programs for it’s citizens. Incidentally, this is the same idea Paul Ryan has, among others, for an alternative to Obamacare.

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