U.S. Index of Health Ownership
PRI Study
By: John R. Graham
6.7.2007
Who owns your health care? That should not be a difficult question to answer. Surely, in the United States, every American owns his own health care. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Much of the public debate about our health-care “crisis” actually revolves around this very issue. When we look at the choices we make—how to earn a living, what kind of a home to buy for our family, what to do with our spare time—we have more freedom than anyone else in the world.
However, when it comes to health care, we often lack the basic freedom to make our own decisions. Often, in the name of the “public good,” the state inserts itself in ways that Americans would utterly reject in other areas of our lives. Today, almost half of the country’s health-care spending is in the hands of the government, instead of patients themselves. The other half is governed by a bewildering morass of regulations on doctors, insurance companies, and us as patients that nobody can hope to understand. The result: as much as one third-of our health-care spending is wasted. Politicians created this system—the most expensive in the world—and they continue to add more and more layers of government control, usually attempting to fix problems that they created in the first place. They interfere with our freedom to use our own money to make our own choices about the health care we need. Government mandates increase costs and, more important, lower the quality of care.
The choice about health care should be in the hands of the patient and his doctor.
With the launch of the U.S. Index of Health Ownership, every American can better understand the problem: how politicians, in each of the fifty states, have infringed on their health ownership. In this Index, John R. Graham of the Pacific Research Institute has outlined the true magnitude and causes of our lack of health ownership. By articulating our lack of freedom in the area of health care, this Index is a valuable addition to the debate about how we as patients can regain control of our own health-care decisions.
|
