Q: Do Americans have a free-market health-care system?
A: No, not according to the late Milton Friedman, economist and Nobel laureate. In May 2006 Friedman explained to Larry Arnn, president of Hillsdale College: “We have a socialist-communist system of distributing medical care. Instead of letting people hire their own physicians and pay them, no one pays his or her own medical bills. Instead, there’s a third party payment system. It is a communist system and it has a communist result.... Nobody is happy: physicians don’t like it, patients don’t like it. Why? Because none of them are responsible for themselves. You no longer have a situation in which a patient chooses a physician, receives a service, gets charged, and pays for it. There is no direct relation between the patient and the physician. The physician is an employee of an insurance company or an employee of the government. Today, a third party pays the bills. As a result, no one who visits the doctor asks what the charge is going to be—somebody else is going to take care of that. The end result is third party payment and, worst of all, third party treatment.” (Emphasis added.)
Shifting greater responsibility to the federal government and private insurance companies would only worsen matters, not improve the deteriorating doctor-patient relationship in the United States.
Source: “Free to Choose: A Conversation with Milton Friedman,” Imprimis, July 2006: http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis/archive/issue.asp?year=2006&month=07
Q: The media report that life expectancy is rising. Is this something new for Americans, or has it been rising for many years?
A: Life expectancy has been rising for many years in the United States; this is not a new trend. In fact, life expectancy increased significantly between 1940 and 1950—before compulsory hospital insurance for seniors (Medicare) was established in 1965, as seen in the chart below.
Year
|
Life Expectancy at Birth: All Races; Both Sexes |
Increase in No. of Years Since Previous Decade
|
2004 |
77.8 |
|
2000 |
77.0 |
1.6 (1990 - 2000) |
1990 |
75.4 |
1.7 (1980 - 1990) |
1980 |
73.7 |
2.9 (1970 - 1980) |
1970 |
70.8 |
1.1 (1960 - 1970) |
1960 |
69.7 |
1.5 (1950 - 1960) |
1950 |
68.2 |
5.3 (1940 - 1950) |
1940 |
62.9 |
|
Source: “Life Expectancy at Birth by Race and Sex: United States, 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970, and 1975–2004,” National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 19, August 21, 2007 (see Table 8, page 26): www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr55/nvsr55_19.pdf