182 pages

Pacific Research Institute (San Francisco)

Publication Date: October/2008

Paperback
ISBN: 978-1-934276-11-2-52495
Price: $ 19.95

A Foreword from Steve Forbes

With this book, Sally Pipes gives us an invaluable tool for navigating the health care debate. But she doesn’t simply debunk ten popular myths. She puts lasting insights down on the table for whenever citizens and policymakers must deal with the seductive, but dangerous, argument that only government is able to provide essential economic goods and services to its people.

This important little book goes beyond the issue of raising taxes to pay for what politicians so often imply is free. It takes a hard look at how governments actually spend the money they take from the productive economy. What value do the recipients of government largesse get for each federal dollar and what are the real costs to society?

Recognizing that no delivery system is perfect or even totally fair, Sally Pipes strips away the soaring rhetoric used by today’s politicians. She looks closely at the real record of government, not just in American health care, but, around the world. She shows us how massive government intervention has actually performed and the many policy quagmires it has created.

If you instinctively question the need for government control over yet another aspect of our lives, but feel the health care “crisis” is too complicated to fathom, then read on.