Competition

John Stossel has an informative piece out this morning on the bill passed by the House. Click here to read the entire article. He addresses the argument by politicians that they are "bringing us competition" nicely:

Competition is a "discovery procedure," Nobel-prize-winning economist F. A. Hayek taught. Through the competitive market process, we producers and consumers constantly learn things that force us to adjust our behavior if we are to succeed. Central planners fail for two reasons:

First, knowledge about supply, demand, individual preferences and resource availability is scattered -- much of it never articulated -- throughout society. It is not concentrated in a database where a group of planners can access it.

Second, this "data" is dynamic: It changes without notice.

No matter how honorable the central planners' intentions, they will fail because they cannot know the needs and wishes of 300 million different people. And if they somehow did know their needs, they wouldn't know them tomorrow.

I think at least half of the politicians leading this parade know this and just don't care. This is simply about power. Everybody is at the table for a piece of the pie: Politicians will come away with more power, big pharma has struck their own deals, insurance companies have their hands in the pot, and even Walmart gets something. The only people missing from the discussion is patients and their doctors - aside from the 150 who showed up to be preached to at the White House last month.

I hear about people who think this is the beginning of lower health care costs for their families. That is a gross misunderstanding. If you currently pay for your own health care, at best you will be paying the same or more for (hopefully) the same care. The only difference is that you will be paying higher taxes and perhaps higher private insurance premiums to subsidize the new government health care plans. What if you can't afford your own rising health care costs? There is an answer: you go on the government plan. This is going to fall hard on the heads of the middle class and it's a shame.

*I have to add that I thought it was ironic Stossel pointed to a Nobel Prize winner for his quote about competition.