The following articles provide educational information on a variety of health care policy issues.
American Health Care: Essential Principles and Common Fallacies
By Richard E. Ralston
This essay provides a brief guide to the essential political, economic and moral principles on which all health policy must be based. There is a special emphasis on the role of unique American values in maintaining these principles.
Also included are many common fallacies about American health care that are often used to confuse and obstruct a proper approach to medical care. Facts and reasoned arguments are provided as tools to help prevent these fallacies from damaging the system of medical care required in a free society.
[ full article ]
What You—and Your Employer—Probably Don't Know About Your Health Plan:
The History of HMOs
By Scott Holleran
"From their beginnings, HMOs were designed—by Democrats and Republicans—to eliminate individual health insurance. The result is a vast network of health care collectives (HMOs, PPOs, Point-of-Service plans) created by government that are destined to do harm to individuals. . . ." [ full article ]
Medicare’s Rule: Your Money or Your Life
By Scott Holleran
"If you are enrolled in Medicare—and every individual over age 65 is enrolled, like it or not—you have the right to choose your physician, right? Wrong. An obscure provision of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, which went into effect in January, explicitly restricts the right to choose one’s physician. . . ." [ full article ]
The Incremental Assault on Health Care
By Paul Blair
"On a free market, individuals—even most unhealthy ones—could afford routine medical bills; the principal role of health insurance would be to cover unpredictable catastrophic expenses. But Medicare, Medicaid, and their associated price controls have forced medical costs so high that even routine expenses have become forbidding. This is the predictable outcome of programs intended to sacrifice the well-off to the old and the poor. . . ." [ full article ]
The Proper Principles of Health Care Reform
By Arthur Astorino, Jr., MD
Peter LePort, MD
Cristina Rizza, MD
"AFCM recognizes that the fundamental problem of American health care today is government intervention. The government injects its power to force people to do things that they would not choose to do on their own to influence transactions among patient, doctors, hospitals, and insurance companies. The main ways government does this are through: 1. tax laws that discriminate against individuals; 2. government medical care programs substituting for private charity; and 3. restrictive licencing and regulations. AFCM proposes the following solutions: . . ." [ full article ]
Health Care Is Not a Right
By Leonard Peikoff, Ph.D.
"[N]ewfangled rights wipe out real rights—and turn the people who actually create the goods and services involved into servants of the state. The Russians tried this exact system for many decades. Unfortunately, we have not learned from their experience. Yet the meaning of socialism is clearly evident in any field at all—you don't need to think of health care as a special case; it is just as apparent if the government were to proclaim a universal right to food, or to a vacation, or to a haircut. I mean: a right in the new sense: not that you are free to earn these things by your own effort and trade, but that you have a moral claim to be given these things free of charge, with no action on your part, simply as handouts from a benevolent government. . . ." [ full article ] [ watch video ]
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