Article Socialized Healthcare vs. the Laws of Economics

Economics Economics Questions
1

I have been reading this part of the article and I have been claiming that the government owns almost all hospitals in the US:

Some years ago, the Nobel-laureate economist Milton Friedman studied the history of healthcare supply in America. In a 1992 study published by the Hoover Institution, entitled “Input and Output in Health Care,” Friedman noted that 56 percent of all hospitals in America were privately owned and for-profit in 1910. After 60 years of subsidies for government-run hospitals, the number had fallen to about 10 percent. It took decades, but by the early 1990s government had taken over almost the entire hospital industry. That small portion of the industry that remains for-profit is regulated in an extraordinarily heavy way by federal, state and local governments so that many (perhaps most) of the decisions made by hospital administrators have to do with regulatory compliance as opposed to patient/customer service in pursuit of profit.

However, someone recently pointed out that this seems fishy. I did an online search and I found this website, which claims different statistics for government ownership:

http://www.aha.org/research/rc/stat-studies/fast-facts.shtml

I may have misread Friedman initially, then. The article talks about “private and for-profit”, thus maybe excluding non-profit hospitals. If this is so, then I have been spreading lies in the interwebs about government owning the hospitals.

How do you read this and can you help clear this up so I don’t propagate lies?

2

Where does the money to fund the hospitals come from? Who is/are the customer/s? Freidman is speaking of the reality of how hospitals are funded versus the documents that supposedly show ownership. That having been said, there has been growth in private for profit mini-hospitals and specialist specific institutions as technology has freed up some resources, but even these are govenrment funded to more than half the revenue and then micromanaged through regulations.

3

I’d like to see the original source, then. Hm… Any other thoughts?

4

That was actually going to be my original suggestion. That, and contacting DiLorenzo.

5

Bah, the article is behind a pay wall. And I did email him.

6

“Bah”? “Pay wall”? Did you click the link I provided for you? Many pages are available for free.

7

Oh, wow. For some reason I thought that many more pages were blocked. I mentioned pay wall because I looked up the article on other websites and they wanted my money.