Recently at Reason.tv: How to Fix Health Care or, Lasik Sugery For The Medical Debate

What's the best way to fix our health care system, which is an inefficient, complicated mess of private actors, third-party payers, public subsidies, and innumerable state and federal regulations? Should we place our faith in the government or in the free market?

ObamaCare supporters argue that the answer lies in more government—more subsidies, more regulations, a law mandating individuals buy health-insurance coverage and, of course, more taxes to pay for it all.

The alternative is to base reforms on what works in the other five-sixths of the U.S. economy, where choice and competition increase quality and drive down prices over time.

Can a market-based health care system work? We can begin to answer this question by looking at Lasik, a medical procedure that's not covered by health insurance. And has gotten better—and cheaper—over time.

"How to Fix Health Care" proposes three simple reforms that will put us on a path to a health-care system that's better, more affordable, and more accessible. And get this—these market-based reforms can be implemented without creating new government programs or raising taxes.

Approximately 8.30 minutes. Produced by Paul Feine and Meredith Bragg. Hosted by Nick Gillespie.

For downloadable versions of this video, go to Reason.tv. To watch this video at Reason.tv's YouTube channel, go here.

Comments

[Stacy]

This may be an exception that proves the rule. Nobody needs Lasik -- you can wear glasses or just deal with seeing poorly until your resources and the market price come together.

None of that applies when you're talking about being sick or needing emergency surgery. You may be able to try a few different sources for something relatively cheap like antibiotics, but people will always need a way to float the cost of things like emergency open-heart surgery.

There are a lot of feasible reforms that don't involve nationalizing either insurance or healthcare provision, but pure fee-for-service isn't one of them.

[Ebeneezer Scrooge]

And why is that, once again?