Say Anything Blog

One argument opponents of government health care have routinely made is that government health care suppresses competition and profit motives in the health care industry and in turn that suppresses the sort of innovation and invention that can make people healthier, ease suffering and even extend lifespans.

That argument is rejected by the left, but there is actually plenty of empirical evidence to prove that it’s true.  Case in point, the medical technology industry:

Competition is only thing that keeps human beings striving for improvement: businessmen striving to please their customers, funds flowing to research and development. The fear of your lunch eaten by the competition and your customers deserting you is what drives people onward to build better products, and what leads to good customer service. In a competitive market, everyone operates in a constant state of anticipating the next improvement - and investors, researchers, and business owners toil to try to ensure that they themselves are the ones offering that improvement.

This is true in every market, be it shoes, computers, or medical technology. The shoe marketplace is free, cutthroat, and churning with innovation, for example - the arms race of earnest competition provides wide choice and good prices for customers. The market for medical technology is, sadly, a very different story. This is a critical time in the evolution of biotechnology and medical science. Enormous advances are possible in the years ahead, including significant extension of the healthy human life span, yet this marketplace is not open and competitive. Everywhere is the hand of government, suppressing competition, forbidding all that is not expressly permitted, and dragging the potential for progress down into the gutter.

What is perhaps most frustrating in the health insurance debate is that the proponents of government health care are seeking to fix a problem caused by too much government in health care to begin with.  By disallowing the sale of health insurance across state lines, for instance, and mandating that citizens carry coverage for things they aren’t likely to use the government suppresses competition and choice in the markets.  That lack of competition and choice drives up health coverage prices and makes it unaffordable.

Rather than creating more government health care, and along the way further suppressing choice and competition in the health care markets, we’re only going to exacerbate the problem we’re trying to solve.