Monday, July 18, 2005
More government = less bureaucracy?
[Roy Wenzl, "Doctors find selves buried in bureaucracy," The Wichita Eagle, 17 July 2005.]
It's understandable that physicians are growing weary of bureuacratic overhead whittling away at their time with patients as well as their bottom lines, but the idea that all of that will somehow improve if the federal government just took over is more difficult to comprehend:
In 20 years, they've watched their profession grow ill, choking on paperwork, insurance company nit-picking, and regulation that comes from good intentions gone awry. They spend two hours a day filling out forms, two hours they used to spend with patients.
They say bureaucracy is a menace to patients, that it will render medicine useless to all but the wealthy unless it gets fixed. They don't know how a lot of us deal with it. Bureaucracy expanded; costs increased.
A few years back, [Deborah Haynes] ran for president of The American Academy of Family Physicians.
Had she won, she would have pushed what they've pushed for, which doctors used to say sounds faintly socialistic, or maybe overtly socialistic: a form of universal health care. Meaning that everyone would be entitled to at least basic health care.
Not many years ago, saying "universal health care" out loud would have sounded like blasphemy, Haynes said.
"Or socialism."
She grinned. She and Klingman are registered Republicans, hardly socialist. Today all sorts of doctors speak of universal health care, the plan whose name that once they dared not speak.
According to economist Ludwig von Mises, government intervention is often touted as a solution to problems government intervention created in the first place. The flaw in this logic, of course, is that societies stray further and further from market realities and once minor problems compound into crises. Socialized medicine is not the answer to today's health care woes, it is merely an extension of the existing problem.
[Matthew Hisrich, "Additional Medicaid Spending is Irresponsible," The Flint Hills Center, 22 July 2004.]
[Roy Wenzl, "Doctors find selves buried in bureaucracy," The Wichita Eagle, 17 July 2005.]
It's understandable that physicians are growing weary of bureuacratic overhead whittling away at their time with patients as well as their bottom lines, but the idea that all of that will somehow improve if the federal government just took over is more difficult to comprehend:
In 20 years, they've watched their profession grow ill, choking on paperwork, insurance company nit-picking, and regulation that comes from good intentions gone awry. They spend two hours a day filling out forms, two hours they used to spend with patients.
They say bureaucracy is a menace to patients, that it will render medicine useless to all but the wealthy unless it gets fixed. They don't know how a lot of us deal with it. Bureaucracy expanded; costs increased.
A few years back, [Deborah Haynes] ran for president of The American Academy of Family Physicians.
Had she won, she would have pushed what they've pushed for, which doctors used to say sounds faintly socialistic, or maybe overtly socialistic: a form of universal health care. Meaning that everyone would be entitled to at least basic health care.
Not many years ago, saying "universal health care" out loud would have sounded like blasphemy, Haynes said.
"Or socialism."
She grinned. She and Klingman are registered Republicans, hardly socialist. Today all sorts of doctors speak of universal health care, the plan whose name that once they dared not speak.
According to economist Ludwig von Mises, government intervention is often touted as a solution to problems government intervention created in the first place. The flaw in this logic, of course, is that societies stray further and further from market realities and once minor problems compound into crises. Socialized medicine is not the answer to today's health care woes, it is merely an extension of the existing problem.
[Matthew Hisrich, "Additional Medicaid Spending is Irresponsible," The Flint Hills Center, 22 July 2004.]
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