What Money Can't Buy

I received the following from Richard Passoth, a co-author of the Utah Healthcare Initiative proposal:

A recent article in the Atlantic Monthly by Michael Sandel, a political philosopher at Harvard (What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets) points out very clearly why market-driven health care is simply the wrong model. Health care is a service of altruism at its base, not another item for sale. Mr. Sandel states America and Europe have drifted from having a market economy to a market society where “everything is for sale.” Markets applied to health care fail to value persons with dignity and respect. They become “instruments of gain and objects of use.”

All our fiddling with insurance plans simply fails to face this market triumphalism in our society. We become victims of our ideology that we unthinkingly have applied to every living thing that creeps the earth. This has drained moral and civic energy behind any healthy service system.

My comment:

A market based strategy for health system reform will always fail because of the poor fit between market forces and health care.

Dr. Joe Jarvis