O California? Backdoor Canadian-style healthcare to shutter CA hospitals
Image by Susan Law Cain
Even a single-party state knows better than to enact single payer healthcare. Instead, legislators will let under-the-radar price capping do their dirty work. California Globe’s Ted Stroll explains how after rent control decimated housing supply and regulations sent homeowner insurers fleeing, healthcare is next on the chopping block. A new state-mandated spending cap will limit access to treatment by punishing providers.
California is poised to cap health care spending. A 3.5% spending cap starts next year and drops incrementally to 3% in 2029. Spending will be artificially limited by edicts from a new “Office of Health Care Affordability,” which the Legislature enacted in 2022.
Price regulation may sometimes be justified when the supplier is a monopoly, in which case price controls may be the lesser of two evils, or there is a grave but temporary emergency.
The California health-care market is not a monopoly. Aside from monopolies and times of war, I’m unaware of any price control that’s ever worked as lawmakers intended it to. Controls lead to scarcity and can cause higher prices than a free market would charge. We see this in California with rent control as well as with homeowner insurance. Health care will be next.
Cynics might be forgiven for speculating that this spending cap is a roundabout way of creating a state-run health-care monopoly. So-called single-payer health insurance legislation always fails. So, what to do, since some legislators want a Canada-style system, even though that system is in a state of crisis and Canadians struggle to get health care?
The answer: create a regulatory agency so that legislators aren’t directly implicated if something goes wrong, and have it impose price controls on health care. Already, California faces a hospital crisis, and price controls will worsen it.
Read the whole thing here.
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