Lowering healthcare costs: government action--and inaction--in diverse areas of public policy is having a predictable negative effect on the costs (and quality) of American healthcare.(HEALTHCARE)(Cover Story)

Healthcare costs are skyrocketing. Most people are frustrated and angry about the state of affairs, and they want something done to rectify the problem. Added to the cacophony of complaints are claims by medical "experts" that the United States' healthcare is sub-par and controlled by greedy doctors and pharmaceutical companies and that Americans definitely don't get the healthcare that they pay for. If one asks most people what should be done about the problem, the answer usually involves government intervention as a solution--something along the lines of "the government ought to put a stop to runaway costs."

Even many people who are knowledgeable about government's disastrous interventions into healthcare nonetheless still push for more government control. They defend their viewpoint by saying that the past failures of government-controlled healthcare happened merely because the government programs were not implemented properly, but that they could be if "partisan politics" were set aside--not true.

In countries with strict government controls such as Cuba and Russia, medicine is not only substandard; it is horrifically dangerous. When Russia's economy collapsed in the early 1990s and foreign observers gained access to Russian hospitals, they learned that most Soviet medical personnel and scientists followed the teachings of a man named Trofim Lysenko, who taught that chromosomes and DNA were unimportant and that bacteria and viruses spontaneously formed out of organic matter--meaning that doctors and nurses were usually at a loss to explain concepts such as molecular biology, cell function, antibiotic resistance of bacteria, and hormone interaction with cells. One day-to-day result of this lack of knowledge was that massive numbers of diseases were transmitted from sick to healthy people through the reuse of unsterilized syringes. The axiom holds true that says, "The more government exerts control over something, the less efficient it is."

Americans need to come to grips with the fact that government intervention into healthcare is not the answer and is, in fact, responsible for causing much of the sharp rise in healthcare costs in the United States, which has the highest healthcare costs per capita in the world. Because many of the mechanisms causing healthcare costs to rise are fairly straightforward and within the abilities of Congress to remedy, this revelation could actually be considered good news.

The following three sections of this article show the cause and effect relationship between government and healthcare costs.

Federal Government's Toothsome Bite Into Healthcare

Past federal involvement in healthcare has resulted in increased numbers of uninsured citizens, national debt, and poorer care.