Eliminating Competition and Increasing Prices
Thursday, September 18th, 2008 By Marc KilmerThis election season has seen a lot of talk about how to fix the health care industry in America. Most on the Left seem to think that we have some sort of unregulated, free market health care system that’s a mess because government doesn’t regulate it enough. In reality, though, we have a quasi-socialist system that suffers the problems it does largely because government interferes too much.
Over at the Cato Institute, Shirley Svorny produced a report that illustrates how medical licensing laws do not help the consumer but instead restrict competition and drive up the price of health care, leading to less access to those with lower incomes:
…licensure not only fails to protect consumers from incompetent physicians, but, by raising barriers to entry, makes health care more expensive and less accessible. Institutional oversight and a sophisticated network of private accrediting and certification organizations, all motivated by the need to protect reputations and avoid legal liability, offer whatever consumer protections exist today.
Consumers would benefit were states to eliminate professional licensing in medicine and leave education, credentialing, and scope-of-practice decisions entirely to the private sector and the courts.
Tags: Competition, Health care, licensure
