Via Jesse Walker, Kevin Carson has a great piece up at the P2P Foundation’s blog on government regulation and “radical monopoly”, with a particular focus on cartelization and the medical industry. Here’s Kevin’s comparison between the sort of deregulated, “open-source” system he favors and the mess we’ve presently got:

In an open-source healthcare system, someone might go to vocational school for accreditation as the equivalent of a Chinese “barefoot doctor.” He could set fractures and deal with other basic traumas, and diagnose the more obvious infectious diseases. He might listen to your cough, do a sputum culture and maybe a chest x-ray, and give you a round of zithro for your pneumonia. But you can’t purchase such services by themselves without paying the full cost of a college and med school education plus residency.

The government having made some aspects of treatment artificially lucrative with its patent system and licensing cartel, the standards of practice naturally gravitate toward where the money is. The newly patented “me too” drugs crowd out drugs that are almost (if not entirely) as good, so that the cost of medicine is many times higher than necessary. The licensing cartel requires diagnosis and treatment by someone with an MD’s level of training, when something much less might be all that’s needed.

Result: radical monopoly. The state-sponsored crowding-out makes other, cheaper (and often more appropriate) forms of treatment less usable, and renders cheaper (but adequate) treatments artificially scarce.

Now that’s a libertarian, my friends. As with most of what Kevin writes, you ought to read the whole thing.

Earlier: I talked up a paper by Shirley Svorny on the economics of state-sponsored medical licensure, and Kevin left some “baby step” proposals for reform in the comments.

Elsewhere: Mike Riggs in Reason on the nefarious ADA; Kevin’s “Free Market Agenda for Healthcare Reform”; Roderick Long on false dichotomies in the health policy debate; and here is Kevin’s blog.

     Filed under: government/law, health care, libertarianism