A looming doctor shortage threatens to create a national healthcare crisis by further limiting access to physicians, jeopardizing quality and accelerating cost increases.
Twelve states — including California, Texas and Florida — report some physician shortages now or expect them within a few years. Across the country, patients are experiencing or soon will face shortages in at least a dozen physician specialties, including cardiology and radiology and several pediatric and surgical subspecialties.
The shortages are putting pressure on medical schools to boost enrollment, and on lawmakers to lift a cap on funding for physician training and to ease limits on immigration of foreign physicians, who already constitute 25% of the white-coated workforce.
But it may be too late to head off havoc for at least the next decade, experts say, given the long lead time to train surgeons and other specialists.
I am willing to bet that this crisis could be solved by a freer market, but it can only be another airy prediction. We are sooner to see pigs fly or a stable and democratic Iraq than we will see the medical schools and government cease colluding in their flagrant abuse of a naive people's belief that the market is, in fact, free.
The only solution to this crisis has been abandoned before it was even examined. After all, we are implicitly told that the market was not able to solve the problem. Never mind that the market was not given a chance to work; the myth that government involvement in the economy is both good and necessary can only be built on fallacious presumptions. The government will become more heavily involved in the medical practices of both doctors and patients. Any bets as to the affect further third party intrusion will have on the health of the two more important parties?
It is preposterous to complain about high gas prices and a shortage of doctors while claiming to be an advocate of the free and open market, when, in the same bemoaning breath, one demands the government "do something" about the crisis. Either one accepts a free market or one prefers the planned economy of Stalin. Even supposing that the mushy middle ground of high regulation, taxes, and overall government invasiveness is more beneficent than a capitalist utopia, is it possible to believe that the government will prudently stop short of Stalin's attempt to control the entire economy? To believe such is to confess an ignorance of human nature and human history.
People do not want freedom. They do not want a free market; they do not want the terrifying liberty which comes of being accountable only to oneself and one's God. We still prefer bread and circuses, but now they take the form of doctors aplenty, soon to be covered by universal health care as implemented by Hillary, and cheap gas for automobiles, which are the size of tanks--as these are our rights as Americans.
Liberty is but an expensive extravagance.
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