Document Type
Review
Publication Date
2008
Abstract
Most of us look forward to a heaven where people don't get sick. But if they do, health care would be traded among fully informed patients and providers in perfectly competitive and frictionless markets. In that perfect world, sick citizens simply shop for doctors the way they shop for other consumer goods. The better doctors, like the most elegant hotel rooms and fanciest cars, would cost more than inferior doctors. Patients would consult their utility meters and, with appropriate attention to discounting over an infinite lifetime, choose accordingly. After each treatment, the patients would know the quality of their outcome and would accurately tell their friends in heaven whether they got a good deal on their appendectomy, bypass surgery, or what have you. Unfortunately, that's not the way it works here in the corporeal world. Illness is messy. Medical treatment is complex. Knowledge is limited. Decisions need to be made quickly. And, therefore, health care markets are a muddle. Enter Professor David Hyman. Posing as Underling Demon 666, Hyman has written a book-length letter to Satan about Medicare, the federal health insurance program for people age sixty-five and older. In the letter. Hyman explains that only one thing stands in the way of having heaven's health care system here on earth: big government.
Recommended Citation
Horwitz, Jill R. "The Virtues of Medicare." Review of Medicare Meets Mephistopheles, by D. A. Hyman. Mich. L. Rev. 106, no. 6 (2008): 1001-19.