{"id":4085,"date":"2010-03-04T01:15:46","date_gmt":"2010-03-04T06:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=4085"},"modified":"2010-03-04T16:42:55","modified_gmt":"2010-03-04T21:42:55","slug":"the-msm-wakes-up-to-healthcare-markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/4085\/the-msm-wakes-up-to-healthcare-markets\/","title":{"rendered":"The MSM Wakes up to Healthcare Markets"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sign #535 that health care reform efforts have dragged on for too long: the mainstream media, having exhausted its other options, is starting to make sense … and in the journalistic wasteland of weekly newsmagazines, no less.<\/p>\n

Newsweek’s Howard Fineman turns this week<\/a> to the hallmark of a liberal journalist afraid that he’s going to miss his deadline — making grand conclusions about policy based on a personal anecdote. After falling ill on a trip in Argentina, Fineman became convinced that the American healthcare reform debate hasn’t focused nearly enough on the cost to the consumer. To wit:<\/p>\n

President Obama proclaims his plan (whatever it finally is) to be “reform.” But from what I can see, it would merely feed, at taxpayer expense, 30 million currently “uncovered” people into a wasteful system that doesn’t have either the price-signaling power of a marketplace or the sweeping overview and control of a state-run bureacracy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Apart from his ambivalence between free-market health care and an authoritarian system, this is the sound of Howard Fineman making sense (this probably has something to do with the earth reversing its polarity).<\/p>\n

But if Newsweek deserves accolades for groping towards insight, Time deserves a standing ovation for one of the most insightful pieces they’re published in years (of course, it was relegated to their “The Curious Capitalist” blog), courtesy of one Barbara Kiviat. In a piece titled “Could Price Tags Save American Health Care?”<\/a>, Kiviat has a vivid dream of a more-market friendly healthcare sector:<\/p>\n

I wish everyone in America could instantaneously have insurance set up this way [based on transparent price and quality]. I wish that every time any person went to the doctor, he asked: How much does this cost? How much does that cost? Is there a less-expensive way to do this? Naturally, people with high deductibles are already incentivized to do this. So are people without insurance.
\nBut I want to go even further. I want everyone to have easy access to price information, even those people who don’t think\u2014or want\u2014to ask. When I go to a hotel, there is sign on the back of the door that tells me the most the room can cost. When I go to a car dealership, there are sticker prices on every windshield. When I go to Wal-Mart, there are price tags on the shelves.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Conservatives looking to shed the “Party of No” mantle should take note of these and other insights into the virtues of consumer-driven health care. The case is an easy one to make: if it works in every other sector of the economy, why not in the doctor’s office?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sign #535 that health care reform efforts have dragged on for too long: the mainstream media, having exhausted its other options, is starting to make sense … and in the journalistic wasteland of weekly newsmagazines, no less. Newsweek’s Howard Fineman turns this week to the hallmark of a liberal journalist afraid that he’s going to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4085","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4085"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4099,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4085\/revisions\/4099"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4085"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4085"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4085"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}