“The real right to medical care” [updated]

George Reisman has just posted on his web site www.capitalism.net a reprint of his 1994 essay THE REAL RIGHT TO MEDICAL CARE VERSUS SOCIALIZED MEDICINE. Says George:

I wrote this essay to help defeat the Clinton plan for socialized medicine. In all essentials it’s as valid today as it was then. It’s a demonstration that government intervention inspired by the philosophy of collectivism is the cause of America's medical crisis and that a free market in medical care is the solution for the crisis. I urge everyone who wants to help defeat the essentially similar Obama scheme to read it.

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman once again shows himself on the wrong side of every contemporary issue.  Here he is getting ‘pwned’ (as the youngsters say) in a ‘straw poll move’ in a health care debate last year  [hat tip David R. Henderson.

UPDATE:  Why is the US moving towards socialised medicine?  Yaron Brook has the answer:  it all changed when the “view of health care as an economic product--for which each individual must assume responsibility--had given way to a view of health care as a ‘right,’ an unearned ‘entitlement,’ to be provided at others' expense.”

The resulting system aimed to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors . . . Shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them led to an explosion in spending.

And at that point newer and further “interventions” had to be made “to preserve the ‘right’ to health care” – more and more expensive and intrusive interventions until one day America woke up and . . .  it got where it is today. It’s a study in microcosm how giving away the principle gives away the whole field.

Read Yaron Brooks Why Are We Moving Toward Socialized Medicine? here at the Freedom & Individual Rights in Medicine (FIRM) blog, where you can find much more great stuff along similar lines, including a neat John Stossel special on ObamaCare.