BOOK REVIEW: The Powerful Case for Free Market Healthcare

The power grab from leftists during this pandemic requires an answer. Dr. Julio Gonzalez provides it in his new book, The Case for Free Market Healthcare, that builds the powerful case for free market healthcare to solve our challenges from drug costs to available physicians to lower costs.

An orthopaedic surgeon, attorney, former Florida Representative and author of The Federalist Pages, Dr. Gonzalez draws on his rich and varied background and meticulous style to deliver one of the strongest and convincing cases ever for the free market available.  In this new book, you don’t just get the answers, you get the full background and reasoned case for why the free market is indisputably the best solution for healthcare delivery.  In Dr. Gonzalez’s telling, it is not enough for the reader to know that free market healthcare is the best option, he also wants you to know why in such a way that you can not only understand it, you can use it to convince others.

Personally, I’m hoping that policymakers will take the time to sit down and read this book. My gosh, it would enlighten them and tamp down some terrible ideas being discussed. The timing could hardly be more relevant.

Dr. Gonzalez makes the case for health savings accounts; not the meager program politicians have created, but a robust one that essentially transfers the power over healthcare back to Americans.  Physician shortages, he discusses opening American opportunities to Americans.  High drug prices? The primary reason for them, Gonzalez demonstrates, is the destruction by Medicare of those very forces that naturally work to keep those prices down. Too much government — not too little.

The drug shortages plaguing America’s healthcare providers? If he hadn’t given you citations that you could easily access from your computer, you wouldn’t believe what he reports.  Epinephrine, lidocaine, bicarbonate, and elemental intravenous antibiotics are just a few examples of medications American hospitals struggle to keep in their stocks.  You wouldn’t know about this dire situation unless you’re a hospital pharmacist, maybe a doctor with hospital privileges as Dr. Gonzalez is — or unless you read it in his book. I sure didn’t.

But it’s in the arena of rationing where The Case for Free Market Healthcare really overwhelms. Of course there are the contextual discussions of outright rationing through mandates and prohibitions like you see in Japan and some of Europe.  But did you know the extent to which government-directed rationing takes place in the United States? In meticulous detail, Gonzalez shows you the myriad of market manipulations the federal government is undertaking to steer you in favor or away from certain treatments to the point of making access to some prohibitive. That is rationing, my friends.

This book is a must-read for anyone caring about the country’s healthcare future. By going through the materials, you will be in a much stronger position to ward off the attacks from the big government left and to recognize why their arguments are so hollow.  It is one of the best reads you can undertake during this time of quarantine — and beyond.

EDITORS NOTE: This Revolutionary Act column is republished with permission. © All rights reserved.

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