And the supply-side is the most easily expanded. Reduced licensing requirements, allow cross state medical licensing, allow Walmart, Walgreens, Costco, etc. to work their market magic and you’ll see healthcare costs plummet.
What the GOP has failed to do is recognize the supply side solutions. Why not have a national medical license that allows labor to move to where the need is? Why not simplify the FDA pharmaceutical rules and allow European approved drugs in America? Why not allow terminal patients to try any experimental drug they can? It’s just plain stupid when the solutions are right before your eyes.
More supply means lower prices. Yet, the GOP simply asks people to pay more. When has any company used the “pay more for the same” strategy and succeeded? Why would anyone think that will work for politics?
The Dems know that “if it’s free it’s for me” and use it to their advantage. We know that supply side economics works, but instead we approach medical care like Keynesians (although, Keynes must be turning over in his grave over how his opinions and theories are being abused today).
The problem is the quality of new doctors. IMHO, you don't want just anybody making life and death decisions. I don't have a problem with expanding the number of nurse practicioners and physician assistants working under the supervision of docs.
Costco has in-store Vision Centers for "budget" eye/vision exams and lenses prescriptions, if needed.
That's private enterprise providing solutions and fulfilling at least some of the unmet need, no thanks to the government, in fact, very limited due to the government regulations. But these are really a small-scale, "fill-in the gap" solutions instead of full-scale, "normal" convenience and budget policy options encouraged and made easier by the public policies.
What the GOP has failed to do is recognize the supply side solutions. ... Why not simplify the FDA pharmaceutical rules and allow European approved drugs in America? Why not allow terminal patients to try any experimental drug they can?
All excellent suggestions. In fact, Newt Gingrich from 1995 has battled the FDA for much faster approval of drugs and relaxed requirements for testing and the use of "experimental" drugs for "untreatable" diseases and "off-label" drugs that had similar chemical composition and/or clinical effects to approved drugs.
Unfortunately, the GOP - with the exception of leaders like Reagan and Gingrich - is not a supply-side party, Bush-Romney "establishment wing" of the party is very comfortable with "government knows best" and the top-down approach, as long as they, the "enlightened" Republicans, are in charge.
If conservatives don't quickly explain to people what the Obama's perverted redefinition of "top-down" means, it may just take hold and get stuck, while the "trickle-down" derision never really succeeded to scare people off from the supply-side.
They don't call it Stupid Party for nothing. Simple example I use is that stores sell more when items are "on sale" (JCPenny's botched no-"sales" strategy is the case in point). People easily understand that more products at lower prices is a better deal for them because they live it every day.
Republican "leaders" (with the notable exception of Reagan and Gingrich) are somehow incapable of articulating the benefits and defending the "goodness" of capitalism to "regular folks". Romney may "not apologize for his success" but he doesn't give anyone else the impression that capitalism is good for them, or the confidence that it works better for every "class," including the "poor," as opposed to liberal “if it's free it's for me” message that is very simple and very seductive.
Maybe it's because the Republican establishment and the GOP "leaders" don't really believe in free-market capitalism and (to quote George H.w. Bush, "voodoo") supply-side economics themselves and only pay it a lip service to keep getting elected.
Charles Murray wrote an excellent article about these exact problems with GOP's message (or lack of it) and, more specifically, inability of conservatives to articulate the message of capitalism:
From Why Capitalism Has an Image Problem - WSJ, by Charles Murray, 2012 July 27
Capitalism has lifted the world out of poverty because it gives people a chance to get rich by creating value and reaping the rewards. Who better to be president of the greatest of all capitalist nations than a man who got rich by being a brilliant capitalist? Yet it hasn't worked out that way for Mr. Romney. "Capitalist" has become an accusation. The creative destruction that is at the heart of a growing economy is now seen as evil. Americans increasingly appear to accept the mind-set that kept the world in poverty for millennia: If you've gotten rich, it is because you made someone else poorer. ..... < snip > < snip > ..... From the dawn of history until the 18th century, every society in the world was impoverished, with only the thinnest film of wealth on top. Then came capitalism and the Industrial Revolution. Everywhere that capitalism subsequently took hold, national wealth began to increase and poverty began to fall. Everywhere that capitalism didn't take hold, people remained impoverished. Everywhere that capitalism has been rejected since then, poverty has increased.
We know that supply side economics works, but instead we approach medical care like Keynesians (although, Keynes must be turning over in his grave over how his opinions and theories are being abused today).
Keynes was a believer in and advocate of government fiscal "intervention" in times of economic distress but not of the top-down control of economy and industries, or effective takeover and/or "nationalization" or "socialization" of the industries and the economy.
Very good article on philosophic differences between Milton Friedman and John Maynard Keynes (with a touch of Hayek and the intellectual dishonesty by Paul Krugman thrown in) by Donald Boudreaux, professor of economics at George Mason University and author of "Hypocrites and Half-Wits":
Donald Boudreaux: Was Milton Friedman a Secret Admirer of Keynes? - WSJ, by Donald Boudreaux, 2012 August 03