Legal Commentary

Another cost of the bailout

By Tom Kirkendall

As reconsideration of the proposed Treasury Bailout of Wall Street takes center stage in Washington, other pressing and arguably more important problems continue to be ignored.

Take the chronically dysfunctional American health care finance system. This Boston Globe article reports that Massachusetts' supposedly innovative 2006 health insurance mandate has caused such a shortage of primary care physicians in the state that the wait to see such a doctor has grown to as long as 100 days. In addition, almost half a million citizens are having a difficult time finding a doctor at all:

"There were so many people waiting to get in, it was like opening the floodgates," [Dr. Kate] Atkinson said. "Most of these patients hadn't seen the doctor in a long time so they had a lot of complicated problems." She closed her practice to new patients again six weeks later. "We literally have 10 calls a day from patients crying and begging," she said.

On the other hand, maybe its better that Congress is distracted from such problems. As a friend of Don Broudreaux observes:

"The one good thing that came out of this whole credit debacle, I now have the perfect pithy response to all the lefties who tell me that the government should take over health care and make it affordable to everyone.  You mean the way they made home ownership affordable to all through Fannie and Freddie?  How did that work out for you?"

Full post as published by Houston's Clear Thinkers on October 02, 2008 (boomark / email).