Health Care Costs Can Be Fixed

We all recognize that health care costs are excessive. All over the nation, many Americans are uninsured, unable to afford even the most rudimentary of health care procedures, simply because the costs have skyrocketed through the roof and show no sign of slowing.
I'm sure that you and I could both agree that health care expenditures are a significant issue, one that deserves our immediate national attention, and that it is a sad shame that in this great country the gap between those who can afford expensive plastic surgery and those unable to immunize their children is growing at an accelerating rate. When people claim that the laws of supply and demand have no effect on health care costs that I feel that they go awry.
The laws of supply and demand work for vehicles. They work for clothing. They work for food, and goods, and services alike. We can all attest to their impact at the fuel pump. They are, then, universal. Any economist worth his or her salt will tell you the same. There is not one single iota of evidence to suggest that they wouldn't work for health care costs as well; indeed a state funded universal insurance program would make things much worse than they are!
Let me explain. A universal health care program would guarantee every person insurance coverage, regardless of age or income. This sounds good, until you realize that when you take the consumer’s choice out of the market, costs can be controlled entirely by the producers, and no producer out there with control over price will keep costs low. There would be simply no incentive!
Clearly, then, consumer choice is needed. Universal health care reduces and could even remove this choice from the market, and one drug would cost a consumer the same as another… nothing. When the individual consumer can choose to purchase one drug over another, visit one hospital over another, get one procedure rather than another, they send a very clear message all the way up the corporate ladder… “This is what I want; this is where my money will go.” This gives the consumer power over the prices, lowering and stabilizing them.
Consumer choice, supply, and demand all have a profound impact on all costs, including those of health care. A failure to address this would be a failure to understand the fundamental driving force of the economy.