Assembly democrats hold a weekly news conference every Monday, in hopes the otherwise slow newsday will leave a vacuum that needs filling. Yesterday, it was “Health Care” day, featuring:

• Take $15-million of Nevada families’ paychecks and pensions, peel off more than a half million to profit government bureaucrats, then use the rest to pay $100/month toward a lucky 12,000 Nevadans’ insurance.
• Cutting the “statute of limitations” on medical debt from six years to two years, and various other changes, so that those who don’t want to pay for their doctor visit can more easily make the rest of us foot the bill.
• Hire a gaggle of researchers and website programmers to continually publish the latest prices for medical procedures and drugs. This, too, would be funded out of Nevada families’ income.

Our health care delivery system has lost a vital component of all free markets - informed consumers actively seeking their own best deal. America is at a crossroads. Either we design ways to return medicine to the free market model that brought us to the forefront of medical invention, innovation and research, or we destroy what we’ve got, and replace it with the kind of third world socialized medicine found in Canada, cranking up taxes on working people along the way, and rationing routine heart bypass surgeries so long some will die instead.

I like things that move us back toward a free market. These include requiring government to publish on the web the price schedule it has negotiated for Medicaid, and ideas like Dr. Joe Hardy’s - which wakes consumers up to the fact that all they have to do is ask and their local drugstore will take 20% off the price tag of their drugs.

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