 What led us to Obamacare and some of the market distortions Peter Klein from the Mises Institute is joining us first The progressives will say the free market has failed. Well, we could come back with their what free market Are you talking about? Right? My friend Sheldon Richmond once put it quite eloquently He said something like you know no matter how much government intervenes in the economy any problems that remain Sorry any problems will be blamed on the tiny little sliver of freedom that remains and health care is a great example I mean the market for health care is already among the most regulated of any industry in the US or any Western economy You know financial services education energy a few others would compare to it But health care where there is no free market in health care prior to the implementation of the Affordable Care Act And most of the problems that we see in the health care industry Problems with getting medical services and so forth are due to already existing Distortions caused by government intervention now I'll let's see if I'm right about this because I know this is what you guys do all day 1964 Johnson administration great society. They come up with Medicare and Medicaid So they create this program that's supposed to deliver low-income people and elderly Americans These these medical services so a lot of doctors say well I'm not gonna employ my labor for this amount of money. What do you what are you nuts? So right there the government is dealing with a conundrum. They've just extended this program But hardly good doctors are going to take it right then they come back with this new one Well hospitals have to treat people regardless of their ability to pay Then the hospitals start accepting patients that can't afford to pay They've got to pay the doctors that are associated with the hospital But those losses have to go somewhere then the insurance company say whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa You're charging how much for that procedure? We know you're padding your losses. We'll pay 70% of that then then then you know They get a bad rap. They say okay fine. We'll just roll it into the premiums Then the Democrats come back and say premiums are too expensive We've got to take over the insurance companies, right? I think what you've just illustrated is a great example of what Ludwig von Mises Described as how intervention works in the mixed economy and his point was that you know some there's some Problem is identified and some well-intentioned person comes up with a particular government program Designed to solve that problem or alleviate that burden But that government program always creates some other kind of distortion in the market Which leads to yet another problem that we didn't have before so you need another government program took about the second problem It leads to a third problem and so on and so forth until you have a huge sort of regulatory Regulatory morass of different programs that sometimes work in at cross-purposes all you know making a bad situation worse There's a lot of very simple things that we could do to alleviate problems with the medical care market that don't require any government programs whatsoever one would be to make all Medical insurance payments tax deductible to eliminate the current tax codes Favoring of you know employer subsidized health care programs We should also allow insurance companies to compete across state borders Which we currently don't to make the most of the commerce clause was supposed to do. I'm sorry That's what the Commerce Clause was supposed to do exactly what we want is interstate commerce make insurance companies compete for customers Don't tie people's insurance to their employer Which is totally a result of the way the tax code a treats insurance payments Let all insurance payments be tax deductible and we could alleviate a lot of the problems that we have in the medical care market right now You