I don’t quite know what you’d call these rituals, but the term “private health-care system” doesn’t seem the most obvious fit. Indeed, as in so many other areas of American life — the Fannie-Freddied mortgage market, the six-figure college education — the main purpose of these dysfunctional labyrinths ever more disconnected from any genuinely free market seems to be to discredit the very concept of a “private” system and thus soften up the electorate for statist fixes.
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In free, functioning societies, it ought to be easy to buy a bottle of pills. The fact that it isn’t is one reason why America has a real bad headache.
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if you price your time, even if you price it at kind of minimum wage, the amount of time it takes, this is my problem, that everywhere you look now, you’re seeing a remorseless transfer of time, and time is money, of time and money from the productive class to the kind of bureaucratic sclerosis class.
In a previous post of mine, I observe that the US health care system is socialism without a central plan, and capitalism without markets or prices. Obama is not socializing it. He is making it more socialist than it was.