Don’t Rely on a Quack Doctor
By Robert Higgs • Monday March 4, 2013 8:36 PM PDT • 10 Comments
A man goes to his doctor for a routine checkup. The doctor performs a perfunctory examination and informs him that unless he receives an experimental treatment the doctor has devised, he will soon become disabled. “What’s it cost, Doc?” the man asks. “Well, unfortunately it’s not cheap, Mr. Smith, and I can’t tell you exactly how much the total cost will be until the entire treatment has been completed, but unless you get this treatment, you will soon be in big trouble.”
The man agrees to undergo the treatment. He has to sell some of his possessions and go deeply into debt to pay for it, but, relying on the doctor’s advice, he believes that the alternative to getting the treatment would be catastrophic.
After the treatment, however, the man actually feels worse than before. So he visits his doctor and is startled when the doctor reports that he has relapsed and must undergo the same treatment again or he will probably die. As before, the doctor cannot say in advance how much the treatment will cost.
So, the man sells more of his possessions and goes even further into debt to finance the treatment. To his surprise, shortly after its completion, he feels even worse, and the doctor informs him that he has relapsed again and will have to undergo the treatment again lest he die shortly.
The man sells his remaining possessions, exhausts his capacity to borrow, begs money from his relatives, and has the treatment a third time. After its completion, he feels horrible. Once more, the doctor reports that his condition has not been improved and therefore he will have to undergo a fourth round of treatment.
This time, however, the man is completely broke, so he resigns himself to his imminent demise, puts his personal affairs in order, spends as much time as possible with close friends and family members, and waits to die.
But he doesn’t. Indeed, after a year, he is still alive and feels much better than he did immediately after his treatments. To everyone’s astonishment, he returns to work, feels fine, and considers himself lucky to have had a spontaneous recovery from a disease that threatened to take his life.
Having repaired his financial condition after ten years of normal, happy, healthy working life, the man’s curiosity gets the best of him and he visits a different doctor, an old Austrian, who examines him thoroughly and reports: “There is absolutely nothing wrong with you; nor do I see any indication that anything was seriously wrong with you before you began the treatments. You appear to have been misdiagnosed and treated for no good reason, and the treatments made you sick. When the treatments stopped, you returned to your previous, normal, healthy condition.”
(The foregoing is a parable about government intervention in the economy.)
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Sounds like the ABCT effect of Mises and Rothbard.
John P. Cochran | Mar 5, 2013 | Reply
Brilliant.
Even though the patient is ruined and waits to die, he still doesn’t suspect something is wrong with the treatments until he sees evidence that he’s improving without them.
Does this mean we have to wait for the state to collapse before we will get better? Looks that way.
George Ford Smith | Mar 5, 2013 | Reply
Was the patient first treated at Keynes Memorial by Dr. Krugman?
Michael Foley | Mar 5, 2013 | Reply
Has there ever been a case when government intervention in the economy did any good? I can’t think of one.
Obama care is nothing more than another step in the construction of a police state to make it easier for these New World Order Nazis to control us serfs and dispose of us whenever they see fit.
Those who say it can’t happen here are fools. “American exceptionalism” is a Noble Lie unfit for serious discussion.
Obama care will never work because government intervention never works. It will automatically lead to rationing, and people will suffer and die because of it. There will be artificial scarcity, shrinking goods and services. In a free market, those goods and services would be growing to meet increasing demand.
Demand will NOT decrease, it will grow. It will seek new ways to be met. Producers and consumers will defy and evade the system. There will be black markets. People will not stand still and take this because they CANNOT.
You may be sure that government will draw an arbitrary line and declare that there is only so much of this service to be had, and those who fall outside the circle of care will simply be left out and probably persecuted as well. Bureaucrats will arbitrarily declare which treatments will be permitted, which illnesses will be cared for, and how long we must wait for treatment.
There will be no appeal! There will be no middle ground! There will be no exceptions (except for the elites and those who pay them off).
There is no “health care crisis.” There is only a government intervention crisis, and it is strangling and destroying the American economy.
Martin Faries | Mar 5, 2013 | Reply
“Has there ever been a case when government intervention in the economy did any good? I can’t think of one.”
I can’t think of one either.
There is an answer, both to Ovomitcare AND health care. Take full responsibility for your own health and wellness. Find alternatives that really contribute to your wellbeing and stop supporting the medical/governmental cartel as much as possible.
Modern western medicine does many good things, in spite of government involvement. The wise person works hard to understand what is actually required for health, and how their own bodies work. Only then can they choose wisely and obtain assistance from medical professionals when actually necessary.
Most Americans are seriously over medicated and allow/demand far, far too much intervention by doctors of all sorts. As long as people demand that doctors give them some sort of magic pill or potion so they can continue with their self destructive ways, no amount of money and no system will result in health, or “affordable” care.
MamaLiberty | Mar 6, 2013 | Reply
And I thought it was about that quack economist Whats-His-Krug..
Oso Politico | Mar 6, 2013 | Reply
In the first place, NO ONE should go to the doctor for a *routine physical*. If you go, they will find. They will find something, anything to use as an excuse to put you on some sort of drug because they are whores for the pimping phRMa industry.
Please go to your nearest search engine ASAP and type in the words Death By Medicine. Read it and learn.
Also, go to youtube and type in Marketing of Madness. 3 hours you won’t be able to stop watching if you’re interested in your health or anyone else’s health.
After and I read and watched those two things alone, I was sick to my stomach. Now that we have HIPPA protection (OMG) we are even more vulnerable because electronic record keeping is nothing more than a way to keep track of people and what they do. If you are taking something alternative (like a *gasp* vitamin or mineral supplement) don’t even tell them because it all goes on your record.
And then there’s the current insurance scam going on in the name of the Obozocareless act.
C’mon people – wake up. If you have insurance, you must do what a doctor tells you to do or your insurance premiums will rise inexorably, or you’ll lose your insurance all together. So what good is it? I don’t want to have to do what some insurance agent tells me to do, nor do I want to HAVE to do what a doctor says. IOW, we have no choice about our own health . . .
Scary.
D. Smith | Mar 8, 2013 | Reply
That concept is on one of the “posters” on the politicsdebunked.com website for an upcoming page (which has been upcoming for a few months, not enough time to work on the site), i wonder if it is most likely parallel invention, or if he saw it and got tired of waiting for the promised page, or if the idea has been floating around elsewhere and I can’t recall where it came from.
Politics Debunked | Apr 16, 2013 | Reply