Richard Epstein on "Free Market Reforms for Health Care"

New York University legal scholar Richard Epstein makes the case for "ridding the system of all the senseless restrictions on the provision of health care that should never had been put there in the first place." As he writes:

Right now our statute books are littered with ill-thought out rules that restrain trade and raise the cost of doing business.  There are state licensing laws that are intended to prevent the movement of physicians across state lines, to locations where they are needed most.  There are all sorts of mandates to buy this and that kind of expensive protection—psychiatric and alcoholism benefits—that are worth to most people far less than they cost.  There are restrictions on the new entry of health care insurers into any state. There are prohibitions against the corporate practice of medicine, which prevents the creation of cheap storefront operations to supply health care in competition with the world's worst supplier of routine care—the Emergency Room.  There are countless rules dealing with patient privacy that cost a fortune to enforce but which provide little or no benefit.  The list goes on.

The obvious line of attack is first eliminate all these, which means taking on incumbents who have much to gain from these various forms of protectionism.  Doing so has two benefits.  First, it reduces both public and private costs, and it increases access through less regulation, not costly and divisive mandates.  Second, once all this is done, then the question of health care support can be more sensibly attacked because it becomes a more limited problem.

Read all about it here. Click below to watch Epstein talk Obama, ObamaCare, and government bailouts with Reason.tv: