Here’s my latest video from the Free Market Medical Association.
TRANSCRIPT:
Hello. Dr. Keith Smith with you on behalf of the Free Market Medical Association. Thank you for joining us in this series.
We hope that all of you will join us at our meeting next month, August 21-22, here in Oklahoma City, the details of which are available at MarketMedicine.org. Hope to see you there.
A friend of mine called me the other day and asked me, within minutes of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold ObamaCare, if I’d seen the prices of the healthcare stocks. The big corporate healthcare cronies on Wall Street got rich very, very quickly. And healthcare just got more expensive for everyone.
This, of course, was the intention, I maintain, of the Unaffordable Care Act to begin with – it was to line these people’s pockets. This is what happens when the government regulates a market rather than the private sector.
I read an article in the Freeman, a magazine that’s the flagship for the foundation for Economic Education by an economist named Howard Baetjer (b-a-e-t-j-e-r) and I apologize to Howard if I’ve mispronounced his name.
This is a brilliant and compelling article that maintains there is no such thing as an unregulated market. Many times you will hear those who would disparage the free market as unregulated and unfettered and people will ask me, “are you serious that you believe we should have an unregulated market in healthcare?” This article is really quite brilliant because he maintains there is no such thing as an unregulated market. He says take your pick. You can either have the private sector or you can have the government.
The private sector regulates the market with the normal disciple that goes along with the free market. This brings a lot of accountability, it maintains the consumer as the king in the transaction, it tends to lower prices and it tends to create quality that soars. When a government regulates a market, you have exactly what we have here in the healthcare system in the United States. You see very, very high prices and quality that is all over the board.
In countries like Canada or Great Britain, where healthcare is almost completely socialized, you see inaccessibility; you see long lines forming.
The King vs. Burwell decision by the Supreme Court has made healthcare a lot more expensive for everyone. This is an indication that the government is regulating this market. And I think Professor Baetjer’s article is brilliant and actually places the Supreme Court’s decision in the proper context.
These are the kinds of discussions we have at the Free Market Medical Association at our meeting. And we would encourage you all to attend. Thank you for joining and we hope to see you in Oklahoma City next month.
Thanks a lot.