More help with Healthcare Book

Miscellaneous General
1

Ok so I have finally compiled enough data and links in raw form to at least start my “book” or “treatise” on Universal Healthcare as I have been calling it. Learn more here. You’ll learn that it is really not my book, but that I am taking several dozen (plus) articles form Mises.org, blogs, and forum posts, and making it one cohesive whole.

But, before I really start organizing, I want to get some feedback from you all on categories. I know I have asked, but I really want to do this as right as possible the first time around, since reorganizing will be like starting all over since that is basically all that I am doing in the first place (barring some editing and consolidating).

Anyway, here is the list as it stands:

-Licensing limits supply of caregivers

-FDA limits supply of treatments

-Patents limit supply of treatements

-Third party payers (private employer insurance or single-payer) increase demand

-Rationing

  • How all systems must choose a method of rationing (allocation of resources)
  • Why bureaucratic rationing must occur in a socialized system

-Economic calculation problem

  • especially with regard to healthcare

-Governments current budgeting record (social security, Medicare, Medicaid)

-Why socialized medicine, Obamacare, and current US system does not help the poor

-Why totally free market system will help the poorest

-Current models in the US and various other countries (may divide by top ten most touted univ. healthcare systems and explain the nuances of each)

-Unusual accounting methods used by government

-Poor statistic conformity (as in differences in infant mortality and life expectancy skew true interpretation)

-Moral argument (taxes is theft, forcing people to buy insurance is coercion) - typical libertarian theory…nothing special with regard to healthcare

-current system not free market

  • Level of current regulation Pre-Obamacare and why these regs don’t work
  • level of regulation post-obamacare and why these regs wont help

-How the US used to function (a history of US healthcare)

-Hoppe’s four part health care system cure

That is all I have so far, and I want this to read like a book. I’ve never written a book before, nor have I ever even attempted to compile info for or edit one either. If you have performed these tasks before, please let me know. I could use your advice. If put in the form of a book, which points would you add? Which would you divide into separate pieces? Which would you consolidate together? Which would you take away? In what order would you address these?

If you are feeling up to it, it would be helpful if some of you could also provide a short summary answering the questions I just asked in the form of a treatment or an abstract, as if you were compiling the paper. Doesn’t need to be as long as the real one will be, just something to give me an idea about how you might structure the book if you were to do it, this way I get many perspectives.

For example, “In the book I will first go through X, examining how that will affect Y. Then I will discuss Z and it’s points. Having established the points of Z, I will expound upon Q, W,E, R, T, and U, comparing and contrasting them. Having done that, I will go on to explain the concepts of G and H and explain how the apply to Q through U. Blah, blah, blah”

Finally, after I am done compiling and editing, does anyone know who I should get in touch with at Mises institute or university who might read it over, and see if we can get it published in the form of an ebook, and hopefully maybe even a hard copy available at the store? That would be my greatest dream for this project, but, if nothing else, it could be put on the beginner meta-thread or posted as a response to new comers and anti-free healthcare posters on the forums instead of giving out 200 links to essays.

Thanks, I really do appreciate it, and I think this is something that we will all benefit from.

2

Is this just going to be a compilation of articles (trying to fit each article under a broader catetory in a certain order)? Or will this have your own explanatory text in between, with pieces from articles all over from all different authors to explain each of the points.

I believe a typical flow of the entire book would be like this:

  1. Begin with the current system is NOT Free Market Health Care. (All the government interventions)
  2. History.
  3. Arguments FOR Universal/Government Health care. (Or will this only be a compilation against Universal Health Care)
  4. Compare countries, dubious stats, costs, current laws.
  5. Theoretical arguments against it.
  6. Statistical arguments against it.
  7. What can be done about it.

I can see either 2-3 being swapped, and/or 5-6 swapped as well. Perhaps merging 6 with 4 (Statistical Arguments dispersed thorughout all the stats).

I have created a nice amount of EPUBs (some of which the Institute has decided to host). My work can be found here:

http://misesbooks.blogspot.com/

After the compilation is completed, I would not mind converting it into an EPUB. It would be a hell of a lot easier than the work I have been doing from PDF → EPUB.

What programs/formats are you planning to compile all of this in:

Microsoft Word? Libre Office? HTML? Generic Text? …

Depending on what programs you are using, I could recommend keeping certain style choices in mind (to make the conversions between formats much easier).

If you are going to be putting pieces of articles throughout the book, be sure to footnote thoroughly.

Try to keep dates that articles were written, and when you retrieved them, and SAVE ALL OF THE SOURCE ARTICLES TO YOUR COMPUTER just in case something happens and they go down. Also make sure everything is constantly backed up to multiple places, and save revisions very often (perhaps also appending the date onto the filename).

Also, do you happen to have any sort of ereader? If an ebook version is created, that also will have to be read thoroughly for any formatting errors (I only have one pair of eyes and cannot catch every single error).

3

There will be very little to nothing of my own here. All I am doing is separating each point in each article and filing it away as a “concrete detail” - think back to your english class days of writing research papers. The big difference will be that it is all concrete details - no commentary, at least not of my own. I am also filtering duplicate data, stats, quotes, and points so they are only used once. I am also organizing each of the concrete details into its respective category (which I imagine will be harder than it sounds). Finally, I will do some editing, and I am sure some of my own wording will be in there littered throughout just to make things flow better and transition more smoothly.

I do expect that The intro and conclusion will be totally my own wording, but I am hoping to avoid this (not sure how yet).

i like it.

I was just planning on MS word, but if you know of a better program with which to perform a task of this nature, I am all ears.

If this were a totally professional work (how can it be - its not even my own work) I could see doing this, but given how lax Mises.org is with using and re-publishing their articles and books, I figured if I just had a page listing and crediting all of the sources and the authors, as well as providing links to it all, that would suffice. I DO NOT want this to turn into a giant research paper that is several hundred pages long. This will take long enough as it is, and treating it like a research paper by adding all of the foot notes, professional bibliography, etc, will likely triple the time it will take.

I do not intend for this to be widely read. More a resource for the community to use that is slightly more professional and more seamless than listing out 100 articles for people to go read when they have questions.

Am I not being realistic about this?

4

Ok good good, as I was thinking, just wanted to make sure.

That would be fine if that is what you are familiar with. I would just recommend you learn to use Styles for header information (this is a tutorial for Word 2007, you could probably just look up how to do it in your version of Word):

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/style-basics-in-word-HA010230882.aspx

From what you explained it seems like you would want endnotes. Here is a tutorial for that in Word 2007:

https://office.microsoft.com/en-us/word-help/insert-delete-or-edit-footnotes-and-endnotes-HP001226522.aspx

If you want to get fancier you might also want to learn differences between EMPHASIS (emphasizing words) and ITALICS (book titles), and try to stay very consistent with formatting throughout the book.

Keeping these things in mind will probably be a pain in the short run, but make it much much easier in the long run for the ebook version.

I just meant it as a certain style choice. Instead of constantly stating something along the lines of:

“Robert Murphy in article X on date Y stated this:”

You could just have the paragraph from the article, and have an endnote pointing to the exact information at the Endnote section of the book.

If you have ever read on an ereader before, it is great being able to jump back and forth between footnotes and back. Also, if an HTML version was ever created, it would be very easy to convert everything into clickable links to jump straight to the articles.

5

I can see the first and second sections meshing into each other very easily. Section one might be an introduction, and then the second section might be an indepth explosion and examination of the US Medical political economy over time.

To your list I would add:

-Hospitals are allowed to regulate local hospital supply

-Medicare Unionism wherein more employees are hired for jobs than is necessary (a nurse to hook up an IV, a physician to check your pulse, etc.)

  • The trend of publicization of hospitals (see: Friedman)

-Insurance Regulations, particularly that one which prohibits people from seeking insurance across state lines, reducing the supply of companies per state. Try to do some homework on see this and if there are any further regulatory swindles at the federal level. I’m sure there are, but I don’t know them.

-Forcing companies to cover certain things (treatment for smokers, chiropractors, physical therapy, etc.) increases the rate for everyone.

The third would be, what? Addressing common universal/government healthcare talking points and refuting them?

I would recommend that you work in, somewhere in the treatise, an examination of how people were getting along before certain regulations, and if they were beginning to solve their own problems? Basically, look into the idea of fraternal/friendly societies, how they helped the poor and formed communities, and how the government helped the medical-industrial complex prohibit them so that they might profit better.

Also be sure to explain how Obamacare will make rates skyrocket because it incentivizes people to not get insurance until they have a condition, which will make the insurance companies pay out a lot, forcing them to raise rates.

That’s just my 2c, I’m sure you can juice some more good arguments out of this forum. Also check out Kevin Carson’s essay on Healthcare. It’s a good project and good luck!