Painful Health Regulations

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Oct 15, 2015 Comments Off on Painful Health Regulations admin

As you know, the toll of big-government boondoggles is far more than the things they make worse.

It’s also how they snuff out countless opportunities to make things better.

To those who innovate for a living, this couldn’t be more obvious. Recently, the co-founders of Google remarked on what they see government doing to one of the country’s most critical industries.

“Health is just so heavily regulated, it’s just a painful business to be in,” Sergey Brin said, which “would dissuade a lot of entrepreneurs.”

And according to Larry Page, the result of that bureaucratic burden is to “regulate ourselves out of some really great possibilities.”

For example, thanks to costly and burdensome FDA regulations, inventors of new medical technology — a 2-million-job industry — are increasingly moving to Europe, where devices are approved up to two years quicker than here.

Thirty-six states require new hospitals to obtain “certificates of need” from so-called “hospital equalization boards,” which are tasked not with enforcing basic medical standards, but protecting existing hospitals from competitors with new ideas.

And by micromanaging what insurance plans must cover, ObamaCare prevents insurers and employers from even trying different coverage arrangements to find what customers like best.

Most of the other products you buy — such as phones, cars, computers — are constantly advancing to higher quality and more features at lower prices.

That’s because those selling them compete for your business in a market where they’re free to learn from experience what the customer wants.

Conversely, the more government claims to “fix” the health care market, the more costs go up and choices go down.

For affordable healthcare, the diagnosis is clear: government meddling is the disease, and freedom is the cure.

NLT President Gary Paumen