If You Think Health Care Is Expensive Now, Wait Until It's Free

Our system is entrenched. You can't unwind decades of third-party payment overnight

Of course they're too high. Obamacare was a large part of that. But notice the logic, or the absence of it. The more government gets involved in health care, the higher the prices go, and their answer is always, without fail, more government involvement. It's the political equivalent of a man digging a hole to get out of a hole.

Long ago, costs were lowest before insurance and government got their hands on medicine. While some might accuse me of wallowing in nostalgia, and not getting hip with the new ideas, recognize that history is a key sign about what works, and what doesn’t. And you don't have to go back a century to prove it. In fact, to prove my point, you only have to look at something going on in today’s market that they've left alone.

Laser eye surgery.

Nobody's insurance covers it as a matter of routine. Government hasn't set its price nor have gotten deeply involved in controlling the industry. And as a direct result, innovation has been staggering and the price has come down--much lower than it was when the procedure first hit the market. A modern, living, breathing case study in what happens to health care costs when they're left alone. No committee, no mandate, no bureaucrat with a clipboard. Just doctors competing for patients, and patients free to walk away. The market did what the market does: it got better and it got cheaper.

Now, I'm not naive. Our system is entrenched. You can't unwind decades of third-party payment overnight. It would take a long, gradual move away from centralization and control over health before you'd see prices start to fall as much as we’d like. 

There will be pain in the transition, and anybody selling you an easy fix is selling you something that doesn’t exist. But the answer, for sure, is not what these leftists are calling for. What they're calling for will give us higher prices, less quality, and a rationing of care; exactly what we've seen in every universal health care, socialized medicine system on earth. They promise you everything and hand you a waiting list.

Where's the competition? Where's the price signal? Where's the incentive for the next great innovation?

I learned that lesson on the air, a couple of decades ago. Back before I'd broken into AM/FM radio, when I was hosting a BlogTalkRadio program, a caller from Toronto rang in to tell us all about her "free" health care. So we compared costs. On my end, a PPO for my wife and two kids, a little over $900 a month. On hers, the taxes she paid into the system, plus the supplemental insurance she'd been forced to buy because the government plan had stopped covering what she actually needed. Hers came out more expensive.

Think about that. She was paying more, in taxes and in premiums, for a system that made her wait. She wasn't bragging by the end of the call. She was doing the arithmetic and the audience was learning about how expensive free health care can get.

Which brings us to the old saying, the one that's been passed around for years because it happens to be true: “If you think health care is expensive now, wait until it's free.”

There's a reason that line sticks. It's the whole argument in eleven words. "Free" isn't a price, it's a story we tell about a price. Somebody pays. And when government is the somebody, the bill arrives as a tax, a wait, or a denial. Often all three.

So when the new majority arrives in January and starts waving “Medicare for All” around like a life raft, here's what to ask. Where's the competition? Where's the price signal? Where's the incentive for the next great innovation, if the government sets the rate and the waiting list sets the pace? If the laser eye surgery model works (and it does, spectacularly), why on earth would we run in the opposite direction?

The left's answer to high prices has always been more government. The evidence has always said otherwise. The only thing they've got on their side is a volume knob.

They'll have a majority in January. Let's make sure they don't get the argument too.