John Goodman at Forbes:
.. we are about to see a huge increase in the demand for [medical] care and a major decrease in the supply. In any other market, that would cause prices to soar. But government plans to control costs (even more so than in the past) by vigorously suppressing provider fees and the private insurers are likely to resist fee increases as well. That means we are going to have a rationing problem.
I've been reading the Heritage Foundation's "special abridged" version of Hayek's The Road to Serfdom (1957), and while under ordinary circumstances it might be considered tacky to quote an abridged anything, ours are no ordinary circumstances. Passim:
Our freedom of choice in a competitive society rests on the fact that, if one person refuses to satisfy our wishes, we can turn to another. But if we face a monopolist we are at his mercy. And an authority directing the whole economic system would be the most powerful monopolist imaginable.
It would have complete power to decide what we are to be given and on what terms. It would not only decide what commodities and services are to be available and in what quantitites; it would be able to direct their distribution between districts and groups and could, if it wished, discriminate between persons to any degree it liked. Not our own view, but somebody else's view of what we ought to like or dislike, would determine what we should get.
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In a competitive society most things can be had at a price. It is often a cruelly high price. We must sacrifice one thing to attain another. The alternative, however, is not freedom of choice, but orders and prohibitions which must be obeyed.
Image from PatDollard.com
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Few catchwords have done so much harm as the ideal of a "stabilization" of particular prices... which, while securing the income of some, makes the position of the rest more and more precarious [links added].
With every grant of such security to one group, the insecurity of the rest necessarily increases. If you guarantee to some a fixed part of a variable cake, the share left to the rest is bound to fluctuate proportionally more than the size of the whole. And the essential element of security which the competitive system offers - the great variety of opportunities - is more and more reduced.
Elsewhere in the booklet, the way in which the socialist propagandists of Hayek's era made subtle changes to the meanings of words is illustrated with the term, freedom:
The word had formerly meant freedom from coercion, from the arbitrary power of other men. Now it was made to mean freedom from necessity, release from the compulsion of the circumstances which inevitably limit the range of choice of all of us. Freedom in this sense is, of course, merely another name for power or wealth. The demand for [this] new freedom was thus only another name for the old demand for a redistribution of wealth.
Frighteningly familiar, isn't it? But don't despair; I have saved the best for last. There's a cheer-me-up in a recent FOX News poll (which is to say that you won't see this in the "mainstream").
56 percent want to go back to pre-ObamaCare system
.... The desire to go back to the 2009 system is widespread. Majorities of higher and lower income groups feel that way, as do men, women, voters with and without college degrees, and voters across all age groups.
Chin up! (And in case you thought that was a maxim from across the pond, I just found out that its origin is actually American!)
