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Old August 23rd, 2012 #122
Alex Linder
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Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned as for-profit enterprises in 1910.... It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over nearly the entire hospital industry.... Friedman's key contention was that, as with all bureaucratic systems, government-owned or government-controlled healthcare created a situation whereby increased "inputs" such as expenditures on equipment, infrastructure, and the salaries of medical professionals, actually led to decreased "output" in terms of the quantity and quality of medical care.... This kind of result is present in all government-run bureaucracies because of the absence there of any kind of market feedback mechanism. Since there are no profits in an accounting sense in government, there is no reliable mechanism for rewarding good performance and penalizing poor performance. (pp. 26–7, emphasis in original)