Managed Care Companies - Healthcare Pirates

In a categorically incorrect fashion, those market forces, whose intention it is to maintain the status quo of the U.S. health delivery model, stress the features and benefits commonly experienced in unrelated or hypothetical unregulated, competitive markets. The non-existence of a privatized health delivery market in any other first world nation to which we might compare our own, makes it too easy to erroneously accept the assumption that the essential market fundamentals of our model are healthy and functioning. Some will undoubtedly argue that in comparison to markets in which health services are rendered as a public good, any market that can render its product privately will be infinitely better off by avoiding the inherent costs of inefficiencies and other deficits that commonly plague markets of public goods. (Getzen 2007) However, the U.S. health delivery market is deceivingly non-competitive and imperfect in nature, and the related market costs of monopoly power can be eerily similar and equally devastating to the feared costs that exist in markets for public goods.

If the role of government is indeed to provide and maintain law, order, and justice, all of which subsequently lubricate the efficient operation of economic markets to function as perfectly as possible, there are several instances of over/under regulation which have undermined that very goal. (Getzen 2007) The transformation towards managed care companies acting as an intermediary payer, adjudicating transactions between buyers and sellers in theory could have provided private oversight and regulation more efficiently than the government. (Getzen 2007) The government’s failure to clearly define acceptable practices and business models for these firms has led to actuarial practices and cost sharing programs that focus solely on…

Where the ‘Power Lies’

Ronald Reagan once said, “Concentrated power has always been the enemy of liberty,” but as a notable laissez-faire, classically liberal economist, he certainly wasn’t speaking of corporate greed and the ‘too big to fail’ mentality. He spoke of the philosophy embodied by an over reaching federal government that taxed every moving thing, regulated those which survived, and subsidized the problems it created. Sadly President Reagan is unable to comment on our current economic situation, but one has to wonder what his stance might be given that the power present corporations yield over taxpayers proves limitless time and time again.

Private sector corporations have been deemed too big to fail and taxpayer money has been spent rectifying their mistakes. Present day robber barons continue to pursue sociopathic realities that take advantage of their own countrymen and ignore their plight through exorbitant bonuses, lavish retreats, and office remodeling. And yet, with these examples, and others too numerous to list, some argue that the government, by proposing to  protect its citizens through increasing oversight and regulation, is becoming too powerful or ’socialist’.

Maybe I missed the revolution or misunderstand our founders’  intentions, but when did corporate fuedalism become ok?

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