While House Speaker Paul Ryan is a believer in free-market medicine, a New York emergency medicine physician writes that "in a totally free market health care system, you must be willing to let some patients die."
House Speaker Ryan said that with health care, "You get it if you want it. That's freedom." But according to Dr. Farzon A. Nahvi in The New York Times (“Don’t Leave Health Care to a Free Market”), being given medical services that one does not consent to and getting saddled with a bill of thousands of dollars "is nothing like freedom."
Nahvi gives examples of several patients who were found unconscious by passers-by who contacted 911. These patients were then transported to New York emergency rooms and treated, then saddled with huge medical bills. He likens this to having Verizon adding extra services to your bill and charging you thousands of dollars for the bill.
In the end, Dr. Nahvi writes, "Deep down inside, we all intuitively know that health care is not a free market, or else society would not allow me to routinely care for people when they are in no position to make decisions for themselves," concluding that if we believe in truly free-market health care, we would acknowledge that we might have to let the next unconscious person we find in the street remain there, rather than getting that person medical help.
Click here to read the op-ed piece in its entirety.
