The Golden Rule for Judging HealthCare Reform

So, I see today that Democrat Tammy Baldwin has endorsed doing a Medicare buy-in starting at age 50.

Which means that access to good health care will remain age- and money-gated. If you’re too young and too poor, you don’t get health care, or you get worse health care.

Here’s the simple rule for a good healthcare system: The health care someone gets is based only on what they need and not on ANY other consideration.

This means everyone is treated the same. If society decides that some treatments are too expensive, then the criteria used for whether you get them is never “Can you pay?” it is criteria like “Who will this help most, medically?”

Of course, it is impossible to deal with America’s healthcare mess without also dealing with oligopoly device and medicine providers.

That means you must either regulate them (“You will make a 5 percent profit, no more and no less”) or you must break them up, or you must nationalize them.

When the price of insulin has risen like this…

… you know that the market has failed. And this is for a drug that is not patented.

A few people are getting very rich, by killing people. Those people should have their companies expropriated for nothing, and then, if any charge can be found, criminal proceedings should ensue. At the least, they should be made pariahs, and anyone who deals with them in any way should be ostracized.

But, moving back to policy, if you just give everyone health care, stop rationing based on money and age, and break the oligopolies (while fixing various other perverse incentives like doctors owning testing companies), not only will the cost of healthcare plummet (Canada’s per capita costs dropped by a third in ten years just by changing to universal care), its quality will increase.

But I still want to see most pharmacare executives in prison.

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