"Giuliani Offers Health Care Plan"

“Giuliani offers health care plan”

—July 31, 2007⁴³³

During presidential campaigns politicians always come out with their healthcare “plans.” They each have their own ideas of central planning for the healthcare industry. And most Americans embrace one plan or the other — as though one is much different the next — while simultaneously believing both that free markets exist in healthcare and that government officials should manage markets by way of their “plans” so that markets won’t be too free and dangerous.

It was explained in Chapter 4 that healthcare costs rise so dramatically today because of a continually increasing healthcare demand arising from the printing of money and from corporate and government-subsidized insurance chasing a limited supply of healthcare services. So what was Rudolph Giuliani’s plan in 2008? To have government give people yet more money to spend on healthcare. Giuliani claimed that as people buy more healthcare plans insurers will drop their prices. This is the opposite of the truth: healthcare prices will rise, not fall with more money thrown at the system.

The irony of Giuliani’s proposed government handouts is his statement that “Government cannot take care of you. You’ve got to take care of yourself.” Yet what he was proposing was for government to take care of people’s healthcare costs while continuing its strict regulation of the healthcare industry. Letting people take care of themselves would involve the government going away all together and letting the marketplace work on its own.