One hundred years ago today, on April 16, 1910, Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation, put the finishing touches on the Flexner Report.[1] No other document would have such a profound effect on American medicine, starting it on its path to destruction up to and beyond the recently passed (and laughably titled) Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010 (PPACA), a.k.a., "Obamacare." Flexner can only be accurately understood in the context of what led up to it.

Free-market medicine did not begin in the United States in 1776 with the Revolution. From 1830 to about 1850, licensing laws and regulations imposed during the colonial period and early America were generally repealed or ignored. This was brought about by the increasing acceptance of eclecticism (1813) and homeopathy (1825), against the mainstream medicine (allopathy) of the day that included bloodletting and high-dose injections of metal and metalloid compounds containing mercury or antimony.[2]

Read the rest of this entry »

Few of us relish paying for health care, but when we do, amazing things happen: Strangers listen to us and try to give us what we want. There’s a simple economic rule that what we pay for, we control. Insurers, hospitals, doctors, nurses, and drug companies listen to us when their livelihood depends on it. The more you take the individual customer/patient out of the equation, the more power we individuals lose.

The “health-care reform” currently touted by Beltway Democrats would take a system that insulates patients from the true cost of their health care — and insulate them more. It’s a scheme for spending even more of OPM (other people’s money). The Soviet Union ran the granddaddy of such schemes, even putting the cradle-to-grave “right to health” in its constitution. If we are smart, we will learn from the Soviets’ failed seventy-year experiment, which succeeded in putting people into early graves.

Take the individual out completely, as the defunct Soviet system did with all industries, and the individual becomes irrelevant. The Soviet government was the only purchaser that mattered and, consequently, the government, not consumers, told producers what to make. When the state tried setting quantity quotas for nails, factories produced lots of little, pin-like nails. When the state set quotas by weight, factories responded predictably and produced big, heavy nails.

Read the rest of this entry »