Doctors are not barbers

It is very funny that this comparison is being made, since it was made years ago in an essay by Leonard Peikoff regarding people’s ‘right’ to healthcare:

“Take the simplest case: you are born with a moral right to hair care, let us say, provided by a loving government free of charge to all who want or need it. What would happen under such a moral theory?”

“Haircuts are free, like the air we breathe, so some people show up every day for an expensive new styling, the government pays out more and more, barbers revel in their huge new incomes, and the profession starts to grow ravenously, bald men start to come in droves for free hair implantations, a school of fancy, specialized eyebrow pluckers develops—it’s all free, the government pays. The dishonest barbers are having a field day, of course—but so are the honest ones; they are working and spending like mad, trying to give every customer his heart’s desire, which is a millionaire’s worth of special hair care and services—the government starts to scream, the budget is out of control. Suddenly directives erupt: we must limit the number of barbers, we must limit the time spent on haircuts, we must limit the permissible type of hair styles; bureaucrats begin to split hairs about how many hairs a barber should be allowed to split. A new computerized office of records filled with inspectors and red tape shoots up; some barbers, it seems, are still getting too rich, they must be getting more than their fair share of the national hair, so barbers have to start applying for Certificates of Need in order to buy razors, while peer review boards are established to assess every stylist’s work, both the dishonest and the overly honest alike, to make sure that no one is too bad or too good or too busy or too unbusy. Etc. In the end, there are lines of wretched customers waiting for their chance to be routinely scalped by bored, hog-tied haircutters some of whom remember dreamily the old days when somehow everything was so much better.”

“Do you think the situation would be improved by having hair-care cooperatives organized by the government?—having them engage in managed competition, managed by the government, in order to buy haircut insurance from companies controlled by the government?”

“If this is what would happen under government-managed hair care, what else can possibly happen—it is already starting to happen—under the idea of health care as a right? Health care in the modern world is a complex, scientific, technological service. How can anybody be born with a right to such a thing?”

Payne Hertz refers to ‘slippery slope’? ‘Little relationship to reality’? I think he has missed the point of the essay! That ‘fantasy scenerio’ referring to haircuts IS THE REALITY for medicine. Doesn’t he realize that what is the history of healthcare in Amercia today?! Go back and read the essay and try to get these points: ‘Free haircuts’ (that is, provided by the taxpayer) will result in overutilization by patients, a marked increase in spending by barbers and their clients, further control by government, until finally the government controls the whole industry and rations the haircuts. In the same way that ‘free healthcare’ (provided by the government) HAS resulted in overutilization, fraud, overspending by doctors and patients, and increasing control of healthcare by government – veering dangerously close now to total control by the government of healthcare.

To refer to the current massively regulated system as a free market is laughably out of touch with reality. Please re-read the essay and, most importantly, comprehend it.