Income and Capital Formation: Paying for Healthcare

The call for healthcare reform is a call for choice and affordability, and the objection to the proposed reform is the lack of it.

Americans are not clueless. Once healthcare is in the sector of public authority, where choice is "subjected" to the force and legitimacy of that authority, the supremacy of choice (democracy) is subordinated.

Voting with dollars in the marketplace is a direct and immediate democracy with direct and immediate authority that is directly and immediately verifiable. The choice is not "subjected" but objectively applied to fit the liberal taste and preferences of the individual. That is called freedom. That's why we want it!

The proposed consolidation to make healthcare universally accessible because it is fundamental to human existence is in fact a declaration that liberty and freedom must be diminished to attain the greatest good.

Soundly rejected!

The consumer knows that public sector consolidation of the system is as much to conserve the accumulation of wealth that makes healthcare unaffordable as to universally provide it.

Whether public, private, or public and private, organized consolidation rigs the price and concentrates income, which is argued to be the efficiency of capital formation for investment.

Does the cure for rising costs have to be the formation of concentrated capital (demand reduction)? We certainly have plenty of that (recession).

Controlling costs is a demand-side factor as well as a supply-side factor.

Cost control also comes in the form of ensuring adequate distribution of income (dollar votes) in order to demand it.

Public policy is needed that ensures adequacy of income to participate in the marketplace, not a system that ensures an accumulation of that income in the name of an efficient capital formation.

Consolidation of wealth and power is not a necessary condition for provision of the public good.

The current administration and congress seems to prefer, however, ensuring financial adequacy from the top down, a system that has failed "We The People," preventing the full and stable operation of democratic economic means, for over 200 years.

Conservatives argue that ensuring consolidation of wealth and power (low-to-no taxation for the wealthy--the regressive tax burden of the Hamiltonian model) is the stability we all want and need.

Is it?

If a lack of income prices Americans out of the healthcare market, how does ensuring the lack of income price them in?

The income that has been accumulated needs to be distributed to allow for participation in the marketplace. That will provide the demand that not only pushes the price up, but can be applied to "demand" the price come down.

Where healthcare does not rely on public finance in which the industry is paid whatever price it commands, consumers are more able to demand what is considered a fair price if they have the dollar votes to demand it.

In order for the healthcare industry to increase its income, it will be necessary to lower the price and allow for maximum participation (completely different from the budget-busting public option of assuring the highest participation at the highest possible price).

Even in the case of a life-saving medical procedure (a relatively inelastic demand), being held hostage to the price is a function of spreading the risk which, again, is mitigated by exposure to the ability to demand affordable insurance premiums to spread that risk.

A lower price increases income. Increased income increases the capacity to participate, and the need for more providers (employment and a share of the income), which spreads the risk to demand an affordable price (on a limited supply of available funds) rather than just paying what a limited number of providers command (on an unlimited supply of public funds).

A budget deficit to finance whatever the provider commands concentrates an accumulation of wealth. The redistribution of income reduces the amount of money available to spread the risk and demand the price without progressive taxation.

We are being told the free-market model of "demand" economics is impossible. It is a rhetoric applied to rig the price--to command the price rather than demand it.

What is impossible is to continue allowing for an overaccumulation of income if we want a healthy economy, and affordable healthcare.