Government Medical "Insurance"

But the roots of the current medical crisis go back much further than the 1950s and medical insurance. Government intervention into medicine began much earlier, with a watershed in 1910 when the much-celebrated Flexner Report changed the face of American medicine.

Abraham Flexner, an unemployed former owner of a prep school in Kentucky, and sporting neither a medical degree nor any other advanced degree, was commissioned by the Carnegie Foundation to write a study of American medical education. Flexner's only qualification for this job was to be the brother of the powerful Dr. Simon Flexner, indeed a physician and head of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research. Flexner's report was virtually written in advance by high officials of the American Medical Association, and its advice was quickly taken by every state in the Union.

The result: every medical school and hospital was subjected to licensing by the state, which would turn the power to appoint licensing boards over to the state AMA. The state was supposed to, and did, put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, that admitted blacks and women, and that did not specialize in orthodox, "allopathic" medicine: particularly homeopaths, who were then a substantial part of the medical profession, and a respectable alternative to orthodox allopathy.

Thus through the Flexner Report, the AMA was able to use government to cartelize the medical profession: to push the supply curve drastically to the left (literally half the medical schools in the country were put out of business by post-Flexner state governments), and thereby to raise medical and hospital prices and doctors' incomes.

In all cases of cartels, the producers are able to replace consumers in their seats of power, and accordingly the medical establishment was now able to put competing therapies (e.g., homeopathy) out of business; to remove disliked competing groups from the supply of physicians (blacks, women, Jews); and to replace proprietary medical schools financed by student fees with university-based schools run by the faculty, and subsidized by foundations and wealthy donors.

While it's bad that the end result was to increase prices, it's good that it also shut down a large portion of schools which were only teach quack medicine. Homeopathy is not medicine. Creating a centralized Medical hierarchy ensures that only licensed doctors who are qualified can practice medicine, and not any yahoo with a jar full of snake oil.

You know what alternative medicine would be called if it worked? Medicine.

state medical boards are indeed a cartel. they serve some necessary functions but have become too strong. they have the power to end a docs life for essentially any reason they want. They just recently jerked the license of a doc for yelling at somebody in a sams club/costco store.

state medical boards are indeed a cartel. they serve some necessary functions but have become too strong. they have the power to end a docs life for essentially any reason they want. They just recently jerked the license of a doc for yelling at somebody in a sams club/costco store.

Was it Sam's Club? Or Costco?

This is news to me cause from what I've heard state med boards are notorious for backing docs. Has that shifted around? Or just one state?

You know what alternative medicine would be called if it worked? Medicine.

Steven Seagal says acupuncture works. And I don't intend on calling Steven Seagal a liar.

state medical boards are indeed a cartel. they serve some necessary functions but have become too strong. they have the power to end a docs life for essentially any reason they want. They just recently jerked the license of a doc for yelling at somebody in a sams club/costco store.

woop here it is! [wlos.com]