The first letter in this week’s Economist is from Nikolai Wenzel, assistant professor of economics at Hillsdale College, who says in part:
. . . as of 2004 only 55% of America’s health spending was private . . . . this 45% does not capture the so-called “Cadillac effect” that comes from the American Medical Association’s guild-like stranglehold on providing medical services, the distortion from the tax treatment of certain health and insurance expenses, and many other unseen costs of government regulation and subsidies.
I am fond of observing that my ideological opponents, whenever they want to gloat about the inadequacies of the private sector, invariably point to the most heavily subsidized and regulated industry of all; illustrating Hayek’s law that intervention creates distortion which provokes clamor for more intervention.