4/24/07 - Michael Cannon on Free Market Health Care (Part 1)

Part 1 of 5

April 24th, 2007
The Commonwealth Foundation
Policies and Principles Luncheon
Health Care Reform: Free Markets v. Socialized Medicine

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, discusses free-market health care reforms that Pennsylvania policymakers should adopt.

Most recently Cannon co-authored the book Health Competition: What's Holding Back Health Care and How To Free It.

http://www.commonwealthfoundation.org

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• Michael
• Cannon
• Harrisburg
• Commonwealth
• Foundation
• CATO
• Institute
• Pennsylvania
• health
• care
• policy
• free
• market

[stayinthecourse2014]

I'm a market approach supporter and I like to have data on hand for these sort of discussions.

Do you, by chance, have the sources for these statistics? If so, I would appreciate a link or simple citation, thank you!

[11mc22]

Doesn't really matter

there are still other numerous factors that play on life expectancy

[sjs587]

Actually these countries are quoted on having longer healthy life expectancies, a seperate catagory from life expectancy. As far as crime and accidents go, those statistics are outliers and therefore not accounted for when compiling this data.

Just so you know.

[11mc22]

Free medical services seem like a good idea and it would encourage people to seek more preventive care. However it would also attract freeloaders from getting more care than they need.

economics tells us that if you lower the prices then demand will increase. In case of socialized medicine you are artificially lowering the costs and therefore creating shortages and waiting lines like in Canada.

[11mc22]

Which means that people are now getting these insurance companies to pay for services that would normally be paid out of pocket.

This mean even higher prices!

[11mc22]

Yes eliminating Insurance papers would be good but you are only looking at the symptom of the problem rather than the root cause.

The purpose of insurance is simply to cover you when there is an accident.

Now because of Medicare and Medicaid the prices have gone up. When the prices go up people start using insurance to cover them for services that would not have been so expensive in the first place.

[11mc22]

In a study only about 8 million of the 45 are genuinely uninsured. it seems like a large number but after some reforms here and there should solve the problem.

There is no need for socialized health care.

[11mc22]

Just so you know there is a reply button

45 million uninsured is a myth

about 11 million of the 45 are illegal immigrants

3.5 millions are eligible for Medicaid, medicare and SCHIP

8.4 million are college students who think they are invincible

18 million can afford insurance but doesn't want to

9.4 million are only temporarily uninsured because they have been relying on employer health insurance

Just so you know some categories do overlap

[sschittig]

Medical professionals can concentrate on healing the patient rather than on insurance procedures, malpractice liability, etc.

Free medical services would encourage patients to practice preventive medicine and inquire about problems early when treatment will be light; currently, patients often avoid physicals and other preventive measures because of the costs.

Patients with pre-existing conditions can still get health coverage.

[sschittig]

The number of uninsured citizens has grown to over 45 million.

Health care has become increasingly unaffordable for businesses and individuals.

We can eliminate wasteful inefficiencies such as duplicate paper work, claim approval, insurance submission, etc.

We can develop a centralized national database which makes diagnosis and treatment easier for doctors.