The Cost of Free Health Care

Alan Aker has a good column in the Rapid City Journal today about the mess that is our current health care system.

In it he points out how this mess is caused largely because of government intervention:

As far as liberals know, hospitals and doctors, when confronted with a government price cap, slap their palms on their temples and exclaim, 'Now we get it. We've been charging too much. The government knows better than we do what we should charge, so we'll just save ourselves the trouble of setting our own prices, and use the government-set price for everyone.'

Or maybe liberals think doctors and hospitals say this: 'Hmmm. We'll be getting less money from the government than we've been charging. We could either pay less to our staff, buy less equipment, or... wait a minute... what about that money tree out back? Maybe it's time we used that.'

The liberal's answer would be, of course, MORE government intervention. That's always the liberal answer: when you've dug yourself into a hole, dig faster.

Alan's column has a lot of information about how the whole merry-go-round works with regard to cost shifting.

Read the whole thing here.