Our current model of hospitals and medicine, is outdated

As I write this in March 2020, on the 27th to be precise...
I started to muse about the state of our healthcare and hospitals.
Because of the roaming Corona crisis, the debate regarding healthcare has flared up again.
Most distinctly, the left has been blaming the right again, for were it not the market-liberals and conservatives, that have for years downsized healthcare, cut the funding?
Likewise, the right loves to blame the left for the health crisis we're facing. Was it not the left and the market-liberals that preached open borders, the same connectedness that made it possible for disease carriers to rapidly spread around the globe? And what about outsourcing? Does it not show its weakness nowadays, that we have to live at the mercy of Chinese laboratories? We, who once ran empires?

Yet, it's possible to take both positions into consideration, and conclude both to be partially right, and neither fully complete.

Just as in the debate on politics neither left nor right dares to question things like equality and democracy, likewise no political parties would dare to question our sacred believe in nationalized healthcare.

Yet perhaps it is time to reconsider whether it is a necessary, inevitable and optimal way to run things.
This debate is often evaded by strawmanning any criticism of nationalized healthcare.
To consider nationalized healthcare not as optimal as a possible alternative way to run things, does not mean that individual people involved in the nationalized healthcare are impossible to do good, to be well-intentioned.
But, as often said, the road to hell, is paved with good intentions.

We know, from economic theory, demonstrated by Bastiat and Molinari (1), that centralization and nationalization yields bad results.
We know that food production would be a disaster if left to the state.
We have food everywhere under a free market. Even small towns have snackbars and supermarkets.
Yet nationalized healthcare itself has never enough money, and always faces crises it can't possibly overcome.

Let's make an analogy with psychiatry.
Once it was shown that people suffering from depression and psychoses sometimes fared worse when committed to psychiatry than if they were allowed to recover in an understanding environment.(2)
Logically so, for if you put a person who was moderately depressed, in an environment that is not his home, surrounded by gravely depressed people, how can you expect such an environment to inspire a recovery? That such people recover may be IN SPITE, not BECAUSE of psychiatry.
Likewise with gangsters.
How often is it not the case, that small thieves, small-time drug peddlers, are locked up in jail, surrounded by hardened criminals and, through being locked in such an environment, decide to become hardened criminals themselves?

Might not the same apply to hospitals and physical healthcare themselves?
Our Corona crisis itself points, in my view, to a similar conclusion.

If one suffers mild symptoms, one is advised to stay home and self-isolate.
After all, at home are less possible disease carriers than in a hospital.

Yet, whoever goes to a hospital, even for a non-Corona disease, is suddenly confronted with the certainty of being in the proximity of multiple carriers of large Corona dosises.

How can we ever expect someone to safely recover in such an environment?

The idea of centralization and nationalization, encourages big hospitals, rather than a lot of small ones. The danger here is that pandemias have in fact a more friendly environment to spread themselves than in a system where health care would be far more decentralized.

The latter simply is more unlikely when the economic model of the healthcare is more centralized and nationalized.

Is it not time then, to reconsider the idea that healthcare is too important to be decentralized, specialized, dare I say, liberalized?
Therefore, I dare to suggest it's in fact the opposite of what's often thought.
Namely, healthcare is one of those things too important to be centralized, nationalized, it is too important to not be fully liberalized.
The same applies in my view to things like security as well, but that's another debate, for another time.

A possible solution.

The way it would possibly look, would be that different hospitals would specialize in different things.
The prizes would always be in competition with other sellers, and in the case of bad treatment, a patient has the possibility to go elsewhere.

Accordingly, hospitals would have far more interest in specializing in things, being locally based.
A pandemia would have possibly far more difficulty to spread.
Hospitals would, due to being specialized, much smaller.
A pandemia of a lungdisease, would have difficulty to spread to patients in a whole other hospital that specializes in diseases of a totally different nature.

What we would also possibly see, would be a rise of mobile hospitals.
We already have ambulances that can carry fairly a lot of equipment. Analogous to mobile-homes, we might have mobile-hospitals.
For in ICU health care, time is not only money, it's also a chance at survival.
A type of hospital that is always on the road, would also be able to offer healthcare to those who need it, locally, even at their own home, without necessarily having to be at a hospital where they could infect others or get infected by others.

I think the Corona crisis does show us, rather than the evilness of only the right or left approach to politics (which is already a given, and one should blindly trust neither to have answers all the time) that our models to a lot of societal things are outdated.
This doesn't only apply to healthcare.
It applies also to things like public schooling, jails,..

Of course, the ideas of globalism and open border liberalism are put on hold.
Ursula von der Leyen may not like it, but the belief in centralism has been dwindling down for a long time.
Pupulism of both the left and the right have been in ascendance ever since the economic crisis of 2008.
The Corona crisis of 2020 will leave an economic scarring far greater than 2008's recession did, so why would one expect centrism to win this time? The battle is bigger and they lost the previous one.
With centrism and its associated spokesmen the market liberals, christian democrats and social democrats in losing position, open borders liberalism will find itself in a crisis from which it would be very difficult to recover. Left and right populism will almost certainly gain from this a stronger position in politics, economics and culture.

People from the left blame capitalism. Therefore they also blame social democrats, who are regarded as too capitalist. Hence Sanders over Hilary, the erstwhile communists, gain voters in West Europe, the Social Democrats lose them.
People from the right blame open borders. Therefore they blame soft conservatives and market liberals.
Therefore a CDU of Merkel is losing, and an AfD is gaining votes.
A LR is losing, a Marine is gaining.

While relativist open border liberalism lies in shambles, that is no guaranteed victory for an ideology free of errors replacing it.

The ideas of a socialized, centralized and nationalized healthcare as the summum bonum in health care provision, will due to ignorance, vested interests remain to be the mainstream for much longer, I fear.

One reason why everyone fears a genuine decentralization and market liberalism is because to them capitalism equals power grabbing and monopoly.
They forget that government is a monopoly itself, and what we see of protectionism in the market, is always backed by government interference, it would be impossible without it.

Davy.

(1)I want to add a citation from Molinari's Production of Security, he mentions the following:
"it is in the consumer’s best interest that labor and trade remain free, because the freedom of labor and of trade have as their necessary and permanent result the maximum reduction of price"
source: http://praxeology.net/GM-PS.htm
(2)Check it out at source: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/mad-in-america/201005/schizophrenia-mystery-solved