Heartland's Health Care Issue Suite

What Is Free-Market Health Care?

A national debate is taking place concerning the best ways to achieve a more efficient and equitable market for medical services and health insurance in the U.S. Advocates of free-market health care believe too much reliance on government regulations and subsidies is the cause of many current problems, and that solutions can be found in returning to sound market principles.

A growing number of doctors, economists, elected officials, policy experts, business owners, and nonprofit research organizations are calling for using market-based policies to fix what ails the nation’s health care system. They believe in the vital importance of protecting human health, but they believe past government interventions often unintentionally cause rising health costs and dysfunction in private insurance markets. They also reject scare tactics, such as the common practice of equating a lack of private health insurance with a lack of access to medical care, and anti-corporate rhetoric aimed at HMOs, drug manufacturers, and investor-owned hospitals.

This new reform movement originally formed early in President Bill Clinton’s first term, to rebut Hillary Rodham Clinton’s proposal to dramatically reorganize and regulate the nation’s health care systems. Its members played an important role in discovering the arguments that would ultimately be used to defeat that proposal and that have informed the debate over other reforms ever since. We call this vision Free-Market Health Care.

Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care

The complete text of Why We Spend Too Much on Health Care, a 1993 book by Joseph L. Bast, Stuart Wesbury, and Richard C. Rue, is available online. This influential book explains, in plain language, how over-reliance on third-party insurance and ill-conceived government policies cause us to spend too much on health care. A clear free-market reform agenda is presented.

The Latest News on Health Care Policy Reform

Health Care News, one of The Heartland Institute's five monthly newspapers, is your most current and reliable source of research and commentary on market approaches to health care reform. Click here to view the contents of the latest issue.

The full text of every article from every issue of Health Care News, from Vol. 1 No. 1 released in March 2001, is available in html. You can also download full-color versions of complete issues in Adobe Acrobat's popular PDF format. Finally, you can sign up for a subscription to Health Care News for delivery by snail-mail or email.

Best Columns on Reform

Click on the titles below to read the latest and past columns by three of the leadng advocates of free-market health care:

• Galen Report: The Galen Institute’s monthly column for Health Care News, combining an essay by Galen Institute President Grace-Marie Turner with links to health care policy publications on the Web.

• The Pulse: Greg Scandlen’s monthly column for Health Care News—a digest of articles addressing health care policy that have appeared in the popular ... and not so popular ... press.

• MyTurn: Health Care News Managing Editor Conrad F. Meier’s monthly editorial, in which he waxes both eloquent and passionate on the hot health policy topics of the day.

More Research and Commentary

Click here and select from the topics at left to search Heartland’s hand-picked collection of documents on free-market approaches to health care policy. Or click here to search the full PolicyBot database, the largest online collection of research and commentary on free-market solutions to public policy issues. PolicyBot, a free service of The Heartland Institute, includes more than 10,000 documents from all of the country’s leading think tanks and advocacy groups.

Best Health Care Links

Click here for biographies of health policy experts and links to the best Web sites devoted to free-market health care reform.

Heartland Policy Studies and Perspectives

Heartland Policy Studies are original research produced for The Heartland Institute, edited by its staff, and reviewed by its 100-member Board of Policy Advisors.

Heartland Perspectives are opinion-editorials distributed to, and regularly published by, hundreds of newspapers across the country. Permission to reprint is freely granted, provided the author and Heartland and properly cited as the source.

Conrad Meier, the author of this essay, died unexpectedly on March 18, 2005. He was 69 years old.