Abstract
When Prince Bismarck introduced his radical program for what is now referred to as social welfare,147 he proposed three major benefits — old-age pensions, medical assistance, and unemployment insurance. We have already discussed old-age assistance. We now turn to medicine, and unemployment insurance is our last section in this particular part of the book. In 1880, when Bismarck introduced this system, the germ theory of disease was in its infancy. Entering a hospital was positively dangerous since modern sanitation had not yet been discovered. Bismarck actually may have increased the death rate among his medical beneficiaries. Needless to say, that would have been a very short-run effect. With the discovery of the germ theory of disease and the introduction of strict sanitary conditions in hospitals, they were no longer dangerous.
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Remember that his program actually copied programs that private companies and unions already had initiated in the German economy.
I should say that today there are some arrangements under which private citizens can in essence save money for future medical expenses, but schemes have to have some arrangement under which if you get sick right after you join, you are still taken care of. This makes them quite complicated.
They make efforts, usually futile, to collect fees from their clients.
They are not really entirely governmental, since private insurance is available to some people. This is discussed later.
We need “micromanagement of the patient’s healthcare environment in order to provide a system that keeps the patient from having too many diagnostic tests, which are expensive, and too many consultations with specialists, which not only are expensive but might also lead to expensive procedures down the road.” C. Everett Koop, “The Interface of Healthcare Reform and Telemedicine,” American Academy of Arts and Sciences 49 (October 1995): 46.
See Guido Calabrisi and Phillip Bobbit, Tragic Choices (New York: Norton, 1978), and my review of it, Gordon Tullock, “Avoiding Difficult Decisions,” New York University Law Review, 54(1) (April 1979): 267–279.
See here my “The Cost of Medical Progress,” American Economic Review (May 1995): 77–80.
The Frazer Institute publishes an annual report on the length of the delays.
The author of this book is one of them.
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© 1997 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Tullock, G. (1997). Medical Assistance. In: Economics of Income Redistribution. Studies in Public Choice, vol 11. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5378-2_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5378-2_8
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