You'd think that our representatives in Washington would want to fix these distortions so that health care could be delivered more freely and hence more cheaply, imaginatively and abundantly.
But this doesn't sit well with the political-power-loving class in Washington. It would rather do what the Senate Finance Committee has just done: Ignore the real problems and then expand government even more to try and cover those who fall through the cracks.
As a result, we get Medicaid for middle-class America and children getting health care from different suppliers than their parents. Brilliant!
Bush offered a creative proposal in his State of the Union address this year that would start addressing the problem at its root. It puts a $15,000 ceiling on the deductibility of employer health coverage, and offers a $15,000 tax deduction to every American family to purchase health care. This would change current economics that favor plans delivered through employers rather than purchased individually.
Yet, Rep. Pete Stark, D-Calif., who chairs the health subcommittee of the House Ways and Means Committee, declared the president's proposal dead on arrival and said no hearings would be held.
The proposal alone might not deliver gold-plated plans to working-class Americans. But it certainly would increase the accessibility of basic coverage.
Leveling the tax field is just a start.
We need to allow a national market in health-care delivery to emerge to replace the crazy quilt of separate state-regulated fiefdoms, and to fix our tort-law system that requires young medical-school graduates to spend tens of thousands of dollars on malpractice insurance in order to start practicing their profession.
Health care follows the same laws of supply and demand as every other good or service.
It's not an accident why, as Regina Herzlinger of the Harvard Business School explained recently in a Wall Street Journal column, we don't see innovation and entrepreneurship in the delivery of health care like we see in every other marketplace. As she explains, the health-care marketplace is too controlled and constrained by government regulations.
Americans should refuse to tolerate this latest move by our political class to address failure with more of the same. We need freer markets in health care, not more government.