Health care, liberty and choice

This month Boyes and I have emphasized the current debate over health care reform from the perspective of liberty, choice and responsibility.

Clearly health care is an example of the complexity of society that Hayek confronted in The Use of Knowledge in Society. The dispersed knowledge relevant to health, the care of health and the approaches to funding health exemplify the knowledge problem. A reading of Hayek is useful in examining the underlying assumptions of any expansion of the state into this market (as it would be prior to any state expansion).

There have been two excellent posts in the blog world this past week dealing with this topic.

Over on EconTalk, Mike Munger directs his attention to the debate in a podcast well worth the 1 hour you will spend.

Mike Munger of Duke University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the limits of prices and markets, especially in the area of health. They talk about vaccines, organ transplants, the ethics of triage and what role price should play in allocating. The discussion concludes with a discussion of how markets respond to price controls

Our colleague Tim Schilling directs us to the contra view on his blog.
http://valuingeconomics.blogspot.com/2009/10/evolution-of-our-healthcare-system.html