PART I
INTRODUCTION
Section 1
Overview
It’s time to “Take Back Our Health Care”, restoring the traditional free market in medical care. As with any revolution, the revolution in medicine that would constitute taking back our health care would be meaningless if there were no replacement planned and ready. This book, taken in its entirety, describes a replacement system relying on an authentic free market.
The term “doublespeak” has its origin in George Orwell’s book, Nineteen Eighty-Four. Although the term “doublespeak” is not used in the book, it is a close relative of one of the book’s central concepts, “doublethink”. Orwell highlights examples: Peace is War; Freedom is Slavery; and Love is Hate. In Medicine, examples are the capture
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The judgment of clinicians is a far better guide. Medical practice must rely on a variety of inputs.
There are several themes running through this book. The most prominent theme is the restoration of a genuine free market in medical care—not the “market” touted by corporations, but a market more akin to the traditional free market and Greek and Medieval medical care. Even free markets operate under constraints, the fewer the better—these have traditionally included science, humanitarian and ethical concerns.
The context today includes the amazing scientific and technological advances in medicine, as well as the systems for their development and deployment. Medicine, in utilizing technological advances needs to consider people as well as profit. Technology is treated in Section 5, Section 6, and Section 7.
Changes in the delivery of medical care have resulted in increasingly centralized control and regulation of medical care. These changes are considered in Section 10, Section 11, and Section 12. As we have seen, changes in the delivery of medical care have provided challenges to the free market, described in Section 13, and to free market mechanisms, described in Section 14, Section 15, and Section