http://www.thefreemanonline.org/anything-peaceful/the-end-of-life-rigmarole/ Ideas on Liberty Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:51:35 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 http://www.thefreemanonline.org/anything-peaceful/the-end-of-life-rigmarole/comment-page-1/#comment-21856 Gardner Goldsmith Fri, 14 Aug 2009 04:31:49 +0000 http://www.feeblog.org/?p=1344#comment-21856 Sheldon,You put your thumb on something that has been bugging me a lot. Thank you! You're precisely right. The grandiose claims of people like Palin that prove to be wrong do nothing to further the side of free markets, and add fuel to the fire of critics who say the opponents of "government health care" are misinformed alarmists. The key is to use pure economic and ethical analysis, and to try to get others to apply the same logical standards. One need not be alarmist to conclude that there is only one path that a third-party government health system can follow: increased demand and over-utilization leading to higher costs for the government program, leading to payment caps and restrictions on services based on arbitrary decisions made by politicians or medical bureaucrats favored by the politicians, said decisions being political, not medical. I hope more people will start to take the approach you take when studying an issue. Sheldon,You put your thumb on something that has been bugging me a lot. Thank you! You’re precisely right. The grandiose claims of people like Palin that prove to be wrong do nothing to further the side of free markets, and add fuel to the fire of critics who say the opponents of “government health care” are misinformed alarmists. The key is to use pure economic and ethical analysis, and to try to get others to apply the same logical standards. One need not be alarmist to conclude that there is only one path that a third-party government health system can follow: increased demand and over-utilization leading to higher costs for the government program, leading to payment caps and restrictions on services based on arbitrary decisions made by politicians or medical bureaucrats favored by the politicians, said decisions being political, not medical. I hope more people will start to take the approach you take when studying an issue.

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