Health Care as a Comodity

Atroubling trend in presidential debates that I have noticed is the tendency not to answer the question that was asked.

Candidates seem to have a template of talking points to cover and they just drop those points whenever they some key word in the question that matches the template.

Since the candidates won’t answer the questions, I’ll answer them here — the way they should have answered them in the first place.

I’ll start with the definition of health care, as asked last week in the “town hall” debate in Nashville between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Question: Do you believe health care should be treated as a commodity?

Senator Obama ignored the question, whined about how health care costs are “breaking family budgets,” and how McCain was going to tax health care benefits.

Senator McCain talked about his health care plan — which includes government giving everybody $5,000 to buy insurance — and how Obama is going to fine small businesses that don’t insure their employees.

Neither answered the question. So here’s my answer.

For the economically uninformed, a “commodity” is defined as a good or service for which there is a demand and abundant supply and for which that supply is essentially undifferentiated except for the price.

Using that definition, yes, there are many aspects of health care that are commodities. In fact, most trips to doctor’s offices are very routine. A prescription for an antibiotic; a bandage on a wound; relief from the symptoms of the flu or a sore back or a headache.

This is not to diminish the work of the medical profession — it just illustrates that a large portion of their work can easily be undifferentiated in the marketplace.

That type of treatment is rightly a commodity. In fact, health clinics to handle routine health care are already cropping up in pharmacies all across the nation, handled quickly and efficiently by medical paraprofessionals.

Do you know what happens when a product becomes a commodity? The price goes down!

I’ve seen it happen in the telecommunications industry. The telecom companies fought for years to guarantee that long distance and wireless voice communications were not commoditized. As soon as they were, competition and the invisible hand of the economy drove the price down — even while the quality of service went up!

It happened in telecom; it can happen in health care.

Let the marketplace determine the cost and availability of routine health care. I guarantee that if the government would get out of the way, everybody who needs health care would be able to afford it. The companies that provide the service would finally have the incentive to provide a quality service at a price that everybody could afford.

There are already government programs in place to act as a safety net in catastrophic and extreme circumstances — as there should be. But if the socialist policies of Obama and Hillary and the DNC were ever enacted as they would like, every antibiotic, every BandAid, and every tongue depressor would be dispensed by a Washington bureaucrat with the compassion of the DMV and the efficiency of the IRS.

That’s a scenario that should inspire Republicans and cure Democrats.

Yep, except in extreme cases, health care should be a commodity.

Maybe next time I can explain to Senator Obama the difference between a right and a responsibility.

That’s a Lotta Zeros

I have always loved studying really big numbers. I mean really big. Like the number of grains of sand on a beach. Or on all the beaches in the word. Or the number of hydrogen molecules in the sun.

Or the price of a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe.

This third-world African nation is in the midst of some truly world-class hyper-inflation. The rate is somewhere between 2.2 million percent and 12.5 million percent, give or take a few million percent. When it gets that high, it’s hard to imagine.

Currently, the country with the next highest rate of inflation is Myanmar/Burma (I don’t want to start any arguments here about the official name of that country), with a rate of 39.5%. Not much of a challenge for the inflation gold medal, huh.

A loaf of bread costs around a hundred billion dollars. (When Zimbabwe achieved independence and renamed itself from Rhodesia, they adopted the “dollar” as the name of their currency. Any resemblance to the American dollar is strictly comical.) Next month, it could cost a lot more. Or a lot less, depending on whose math you choose to believe.

The Zimbabwe government, in typical federal government fashion, attempted to stop inflation by making it illegal. Such price controls didn’t work for Richard Nixon in the 1970s and they didn’t work in Zimbabwe, either. It’s funny how the free market demands that it remain free — however rowdy and insane that may be.

So a couple of years ago, they attempted to control inflation by ignoring it. They just lobbed three zeros off the currency and declared the problem fixed. That didn’t work, either.

Last week, they took more drastic action. Gone are ten zeros. Ten. What used to be ten billion dollars is now just one.

Yeah, like that exudes confidence in the federal government.

To understand how they got into this mess would require a study of a complicated history of civil wars, border wars, and generally lousy government. Add to that some over-zealous printing presses in the government capital turning out worthless paper currency with zeros that multiply like rabbits and you have a recipe for disaster.

Through it all, President and resident idiot-for-life Robert Mugabe is clinging to power. He got the job in 1987 by simply abolishing the position of Prime Minister and assuming power. Pretty convenient. He managed to get himself re-elected in 1990, 1996, 2002, and 2008. Apparently, there are more dead voters in Zimbabwe than in Chicago.

Now there is some debate over whether it’s Mugabe or the military who is currently running the county. Whoever is in control has a lot of explaining to do.

It is said that the Illinois Republican Senator Everett Dirksen invented the quote, “A billion here, a billion there; pretty soon, you’re talking real money.” Obviously, Dirksen never went shopping for a loaf of bread in Zimbabwe. He was off by about a dozen zeros.