We don’t require car insurance policies to cover gasoline purchases or oil changes. There is no reason to require that health insurance must cover flu shots or any number of other needless mandates. Loading insurance policies with so many requirements merely inflates the salaries of paper shufflers rather than truly enabling better access to health care services. Inexpensive private insurance for catastrophically expensive medical conditions and a free market for routine medical care would drastically reduce most health care costs while providing dramatically better outcomes
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rescind regulations that reduce the allowed numbers of health care workers and facilities. Certificate of need (CON) laws have swept into 35 states, effectively granting power to existing hospitals to veto the construction of new competing hospitals or clinics. A new medical school must, by law, be accredited by the American Medical Association in conjunction with the Liaison Committee on Medical Education. It’s not surprising that very few new medical schools are granted that accreditation, because that would increase the supply of doctors and drive down their salaries.
-The pharmaceutical industry works hand-in-glove with the Food and Drug Administration to make the approval of new medicines an extremely slow and costly procedure, reducing competition in drug supply at the expense of patients. There is no reason to let a bureaucracy like the FDA stand in the way of patient access to new forms of medicine. At most, patients need accurate information about new drugs, the type of advisory role performed by the private firm Underwriters Laboratories, which provides certification for a broad range of electronics and other products. Safety and efficacy can be assured without the restrictive, prohibitionist, and anti-competitive elements of our current regulatory scheme.
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