John Médaille of the The Distributist Review has an interesting post on healthcare that I commend to your reading and of which I will briefly comment. I appreciate his acknowledgement up front that when comparing European systems with our own that we aren’t really comparing socialized medicine with private care. The truth is that both systems have elements of centralization to them affecting signficant numbers of the participants in the respective systems.
He first asks the question of whether insurance is the answer. I find this interesting, because the health care debate often assumes one set of nameless bureaucrats is better than another. Does life insurance reduce the incidence of death? Of course not. For whatever reason, we expect health insurance to reduce the incidence of sickness. There are many sub-issues within the health care debate that I won’t go over here other than to list: acute care, immunology, routine care(pregnancy and check ups), palliative care, and epidimiology. The insurability of these events is debatable.
He then proceeds to offer three modest measures to help the system. He advocates increasing the amount of care that can be provided by midwives, nurse practioners, and the like. He also proposes replacing patent rights with license rights. I’m not sure how much benefit this will be given that there isn’t much leakage in manufacturing and there is open talk of producing medicines overseas for import to the US market. The last proposal is to improve education, particularly for prospective in mothers in treating the various cuts and scrapes children have.
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