Blizzjunkie

The problem with private prisons is their profit incentives give them goals that run contrary to the public interest. As a society, we would like as few people in prison as possible, where as the private prison industry doesn't make money without inmates to incarcerate. This leads to horrendous situations like prisons offering contracts that would mandate the state keep prisons 90% full. What do you think take to guarantee enough citizens would be incarcerated to meet that obligation?

Aside from the problem with pre-existing conditions, healthcare in general is more expensive than it needs to be. Here are a bunch of market-based reforms we can make to the healthcare system to lower the cost of healthcare for everyone:

• Cash doctors have much lower operating costs than other providers, and would be a great solution to the country's emergency room problem. We should consult with these doctors to see what regulatory/policy hurdles are in place that prevent more practices like these from opening. Check out this video about Dr. Forrest's practice.

• Aside from the problem of the uninsured resorting to emergency rooms, there's also the issue of people that normally have access to healthcare who are forced to use emergency rooms after hours. Encouraging the expansion of urgent care facilities, as suggested in this article, would help

• Phase out Employer-based insurance. It has made America the only country in the industrialized world where a family, already down on its luck over a job loss, also suffer the loss of its health insurance. It has also distorted the market, making it harder for cash doctors to find customers, as most employers give their employees expensive healthcare plans that have extremely low co-pays. See this article for more info.

• Businesses are given a tax break for providing healthcare. We should also provide that tax break to private citizens buying their own healthcare.

• Pass a law that requires insurance companies only raise their rates based on actuarial math. Right now, if someone in your company gets sick, the insurance company will raise the rates on everyone else in the company, even though their odds of getting sick haven't increased, at all. That's not how insurance is supposed to work.

• Require hospitals to publicly advertise the costs of their procedures. When these prices are out in the open and people can shop around, health care costs get much lower.

• Allow citizens to purchase insurance from insurance companies in other states, maybe even other countries.

• Allow citizens to purchase medicines from outside the country

• Abolish or severely restrict "intellectual property" laws, which allow government protected oligarchies to charge an artificially high price for crucial medicines. More information about this can be found in this fantastic book: Against Intellectual Monopoly See Chapter 9: The Pharmaceutical Industry. For a quick overview, check out the Mises live blog reading of the book that raves about it

• Reform requirements for medical licensure that are far more strict than they have to be. Overly strict requirements limits the amount of doctors that enter the field and increase the debt levels they take on in school, forcing them to charge more for their services. Check out this great link on the subject, and on how cheap free-market healthcare was years ago.

What do you feel about the fact that student loans are the only type of loans that are not eligible for bankruptcy? The process of bankruptcy is a fundamental market-check against excessive credit; it punishes lenders that make careless loans. People who go through bankruptcy don't get away scott-free either; their credit history is tarnished, making it harder to get on new lines of credit.

The policy against declaring bankruptcy on student loan debt is the government interfering with the market to prop up their misguided efforts to encourage Americans to go into debt to get college degrees of dubious value.

Feel free to claim them as your own :)

Hi Gary,

While recent polls show a growing majority of Americans have an unfavorable view of Obamacare, less than 4 in 10 Americans favor outright repealing the law. It's easy to guess why: no one has offered any answers as to what to do with people with pre-existing conditions. It makes absolutely no sense for insurance companies to cover them (that's not how insurance works), but because of other bad government policies, paying out-of-pocket to treat these conditions is prohibitively expensive.

Here's a market-based compromise that I've pitched to some of my liberty-movement (G.O.P.) friends with success. I'd like to know if you'd support it:

• Provide a government funded healthcare plan that is only offered to people with pre-existing conditions, and only pays for care related to these conditions.

• Mandate that insurance companies offer exception coverage. i.e. plans that provide care for conditions that are unrelated to pre-existing conditions. No more outright denying all coverage because of issues like acne.

These two suggestions alone will eliminate the need for the public mandate, because we no longer have to force insurance companies to pay for pre-existing conditions. The costs of this plan can be managed in various ways. (Americans that can afford to should have higher deductibles for this plan, perhaps we leave it to each individual state to implement this plan in a way that makes most sense for their situations, etc etc). This would be a way to repeal the ACA in a manner the general public would absolutely support.