Liberty and Healthcare

Why are we spending more on healthcare?

The answer from Nobel Prize winning economic historian Robert Fogel:

The main factor is that the long-term income elasticity of the demand for healthcare is 1.6—for every 1 percent increase in a family’s income, the family wants to increase its expenditures on healthcare by 1.6 percent.

So, in terms of liberty, if there is an ultimate and instrumental value in allowing freedom to act upon individual knowledge for individual aims, then there is no basis for expansion of government - both scope and depth or breadth in the health care market and a strong argument to reduce government intervention.

Eliminating Medicare, Medicaid, licensing for health care professionals and other command interventions society would benefit in terms of both allocation and distribution.

The War on Disease (or on health?) currently waged by Leviathan is merely another example of encroaching power at the expense if our liberty and freedom. This should be no surprise given the examples of the War on Drugs, War on Poverty, and War on Immigrations which resulted in mal-allocation, mis-allocation and an irreversible increase in scope and breadth of the government.