Surprise: The Law of Demand Applies to Health Care
Massachusetts offers a snapshot of how giving more people insurance naturally drives demand. The Massachusetts Medical Society last fall reported just over half of internists and 40 percent of family and general practitioners weren’t accepting new patients, an increase in recent years as the state implemented nearly universal coverage.
It’s going to be much worse under Obama Care. Massachusetts started out with a low uninsurance rate and with a high physician to population ratio.
I think the mainstream media has done a poor job of reporting on the problems in Massachusetts. Whenever Obama wants to appear moderate, he says the idea comes from a state with a Republican governor. But most people don’t have any idea what is happening there.
Cn you imgine what is going to happen in a state like Texasm where one fourth of the nonsenior population is currently uninsured?
Ken, I’m trying to imagine. I’m sure it will be a disaster.
I just read this Ayn Rand quote last night:
“The next time you hear a discussion of Medicare, give some thought to the future – particularly to the future of your children, who will live at a time when the best brains available will no longer choose to go into medicine.”
She wrote that in 1964. It’s in her essay, “Is Atlas Shrugging?” which was republished as a chapter in Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal.
Maybe I better get busy and schedule my annual physical for the next 20 years while my doctor still has openings in his schedule.
Few people consider the authoritarian aspects of socialized care; what Thomas Szasz has long called the Therapeutic State. Psychiatry will be the pretext for invading the most private spaces of the lives of Americans.