Here is NCPA president John Goodman’s latest attempt to “speak truth to power:”
The wrong way to reform health care is fairly easy to describe. It involves large bureaucracies trying to keep 300 million patients and 900,000 doctors from doing whatever they want to do. It erects a system in which people at the top have worthy social goals while everyone at the bottom faces perverse incentives to undermine the achievement of those goals. Wrong-way reforms fail for the same reason socialistic systems always fail — almost everyone has a self interest in their failure.
The right way to reform health care is also fairly easy to describe. It gives 300 million patients and 900,000 doctors good incentives to achieve worthy social goals. Right-way reform involves eliminating all of the perverse incentives faced by people at the bottom. Once that is done, it really doesn’t matter what people at the top think — they become irrelevant. Right-way reforms succeed because everyone has a self interest in their success.
So far, wrong-way reform has been Obama’s way and the Congressional Democrats’ way, while hardly anyone has stepped forward to endorse right-way reform.
