Markets Without Magic: How Competition Might Save Medicare

2 responses to Markets Without Magic: How Competition Might Save Medicare

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  Midwest Book Review

  Comment on Markets Without Magic: How Competition Might Save Medicare (November 4th, 2010 at 22:55)

  Could free market competition be what that saves medicine? “Markets Without Magic: How Competition Might Save Medicine” is an examination of the current health care epidemic with a focus on Medicare. Claiming that promoting competition between private health care companies by encouraging them to insure the uninsured could save American health care as a whole, “Markets Without Magic” is a dissenting viewpoint against America’s problems that backs up what it says and offers a solution. A scholarly take on the subject, recommended for any community library collection covering the health care issue.
  
  Rating: 5 / 5

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  Craig Matteson

  Comment on Markets Without Magic: How Competition Might Save Medicare (November 5th, 2010 at 01:15)

  We babyboomers are becoming more and more concerned about Medicare because we are going to break its bank. What is the solution? The single-payer folks are using this hammer to finally drive their nail home. Market-based options are given little attention because the assumption is that the “broken” system we have now is a free-market fee-for-service model. But it isn’t.

  This short book by health care economist Mark V. Pauly examines the current Medicare system and proposes a way to get market based efficiencies while also ensuring no one does without medical care. The rapidly increasing demand for medical services cannot continue, but our society will rightly never allow people in need to suffer and die from lack of needed medical care.

  He debunks the usual objections of too many and confusing choices, insurers cherry-picking the healthy and leaving the sick unprotected, and the government power of traditional Medicare is needed to control costs. You can read his arguments and decide for yourself what you think of them. I think he makes sense. Yes, he realizes the poor and the sick would need some levels of subsidies.

  Pauly advocates a limited growth voucher system that would keep benefits available while constraining the growth of costs. Yes, people would prefer an unlimited buffet of “free” steak and lobster health care, but that option is going to be foreclosed in short order. The issue is whether you believe government mandated rationing and every higher taxation is better than a free market system (which, remember, would be an actual innovation on what we have now). I would prefer Pauly’s system.

  Reviewed by Craig Matteson, Ann Arbor, MI
  
  Rating: 5 / 5