Ron Paul's Opinion On Health-Care

The following quote is taken from an Interview with the Muckraker Report:

"As a practicing physician for 30 years, I find the pervasiveness of managed care very discouraging. Patients are paying more and doctors are leaving the profession in droves. It’s time to rethink the whole system. The rise of HMOs has created a harmful collusion between politicians, drug companies, and organized medicine that raises the price of healthcare by stifling competition between providers. And all this in favor of moving us towards universal healthcare! The HMOs didn’t originate in the free-market; they are the result of policy decisions that were made back in the 1970s. One problem is the 1974 ERISA law, which grants tax benefits to employers to provide healthcare, while not allowing the same kinds of incentives for the individual. This creates an unnecessary coupling between employment and healthcare that is very restrictive on patients’ ability to decide which kinds of healthcare are appropriate for them. I believe strongly that patients are better served by having an element of choice in the matter, which is why I support letting the free-market determine healthcare costs. This won’t happen, however, until we unravel the HMO web and change the tax code to allow individuals to fully deduct healthcare costs from their taxes, as employers can."