[Promoted from the comments section - Thanks to Andrew Garland]
Regular commenter Andrew Garland tips us to this fantastic post from fellow med-blogger The Happy Hospitalist. It's a bit lengthy, so I'll only excerpt some key points, but please do yourself a favor and Read the WholeThing©:
"Imagine for the moment that you have been taken out of reality and into the alternate bizarro world of the Medicare Tomato. In this analogy, the Medicare Tomato represents a day in the life of a practicing physician...
Enter the massive government take over. A massive coup on the tomato market. By a midnight Congressional mandate, the destruction of the free market exchange of money for tomatoes was replaced and regulated by the Medicare National Tomato Bank (MNTB) ...
Immediately after removing free market principles from the tomato market, the MNTB instituted the principles of most resistance. If something can be regulated, it will be. The word quickly spread through out this great nation of ours that the government would now make tomatoes a right for everyone ...
[ed: that sounds familiar]
In their brilliant strike of genius, they decided to try something that had never been tried before in the world of capitalism. They would reign in the cost to the MNTB, not by cutting the demand (political suicide), but by instead instituting a policy of 80% payment of market prices ...
The first response exacerbated the problem. Since the super duper technology tomatoes were paid at a higher rate, more and more grocers stopped offering cheap tomatoes. They simply removed the variety of product. They removed their rings of service. One product fits all ...
The cheap primary tomato market was killed off."
Now, dear reader, try substituting the term "tomato" with "health care" and the picture becomes crystal clear.
And quite frightening.
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