President Obama's Health Proposal and AMA

All around America people are having to choose between health care and their most basic necessities. As the prices of health care continue to mount, a sickness in the family means, for more and more people, financial ruin. This is not only true for people who are poor or for people who live unhealthy lifestyles. This has been happening more and more to the people who've worked hard all their lives, taken care of their health, and did major things for their country.

The main claim against President Obama's health plan is that government should not be in business of regulating the market. That may be true for businesses such as computers and clothes, where what is sold is products; but it cannot be true in the case of the business of life and death. The present system has shown that it is incapable of containing the costs, and has resulted in ruin for millions of American families. Where the system fails, at such a grand scale, and with such disastrous results for people, there legitimately comes in the government.

As baby boomers retire and demand for medical services grows, the costs are going to continue to rise. The shortage of doctors ensures that the growing demand will meet the limited supply at a price that is exhorbitant and that will ruin millions of American families, including many who are middle class or even wealthy, with results being worst for small business. The market-based solution is to increase the number of doctors by the factor of two or three, and in a true market environment that's exactly what would happen. There is a problem however, and it is as follows:

American medicine is ran by the AMA, which operates as a cartel: A collusion among producers to limit supply in order to drive up the prices and profits for one another. The AMA cartel has created this artificial shortage by failing to graduate enough doctors and by making requirements for licensing of foreign professionals exceptionally difficult.  It can, and it should, be taken to court for these practices. In the meanwhile, everyone needs  insurance. Even if the medical schools triple their admission rates now - something that is definitely not happening - we will not see the results until about 2018. Until then, people need to be able to have the health coverage that they need, and sickness in family must not mean financial ruin for its members.

The Obama plan will make it possible for people to live even in case that someone does get sick. Families will not have to choose between caring for the mother and sending the son to college, or between having medicine and having food. It is a matter of basic decency to make sure that American people do not have to make such choices. No First World country citizens should have to put up with conditions that aren't even seen as acceptable in much of the Third World.