Ep. 37 Dr. Keith Smith Tells Doctors and Patients How to Secede From the Broken Health Care and Insurance System
Keith Smith is an anesthesiologist who founded the Oklahoma Surgery Center, and the Free Market Medical Association. He is a medical doctor but also a student of economics. Bob and Keith discuss the recent FMMA conference in Dallas, and explain how patients and doctors right now can break out of our broken health care / insurance system.
Mentioned in the Episode and Other Links of Interest:
- The Surgery Center of Oklahoma.
- Free Market Medical AssociationThe (FMMA).
- Murphy’s book, co-authored with Doug McGuff, The Primal Prescription.
- Christian Healthcare Ministries. NOTE: Dr. Smith mentioned this organization in the interview; Murphy has no affiliation with it.
- DPCFrontier.com (to find a Direct Primary Care doctor). NOTE: Dr. Smith mentioned this site in the interview; Murphy has no affiliation with it.
- How you can contribute to the Bob Murphy Show.
The audio production for this episode was provided by Podsworth Media.
About the author, Robert
Christian and economist, Chief Economist at infineo, and Senior Fellow with the Mises Institute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood_accounting
That was a great episode. I can’t wait to hear more in this healthcare series. I’ve been following Dr. Smith for a while now. I love the way he talks about the crooks that are running the healthcare system over there — referring to them in some speeches as “butchers” who see patients only as bodies to be pushed through the cartel hospital “sausage factories”.
Here in New Zealand too, there’s pride in the publicly-funded healthcare system but it suffers the same problems as other countries with similar systems. We hear horror stories of cancer patients being put on surgery waiting lists so long that the cancer metastasized and killed them when really they should have been in within a couple weeks.
Also, the NZ govt has for decades subsidized dental care. Dental care is free for all people up to 18 years of age. The dentists charge for everyone older, and it’s so damn expensive (my guess is that they earn most of their income from the govt subsidized patients and thus can get away with charging way more for non-subsidized). And it’s not like the govt’s subsidizing of the first 18 years has actually improved the outcomes. According to our national media, we’re currently going through a dental care crisis. Since dental care is so expensive for everyone after 18 years of age, many people can’t afford it and end up with terrible dental health. Now there’s debate whether the govt should step in and subsidize for longer than 18 years.
It just never ends. NZers still see the State as god.
The most interesting part was Keith Smith saying that in the early days, they were surprised by how many of their patients had come down from Canada because of the length of Canadian waiting lists – and yet they still were convinced that the Canadian system was much better than the American one.
I’m in the UK, and the same applies here. Growing waiting lists, but the vast majority of people think the system is great. Nigel Lawson, former chancellor of the exchequer, famously said “The National Health Service is the closest thing the English have to a religion.” A few years ago, I was chatting with a hospital surgeon after consulting him, and he said something like “There are failings here, but you don’t want anything like what they have in America”.
The problem is that he’s right. The American system is totally messed up. It would be great if there was somewhere in the world that one could point to as a good example of real free market healthcare. But I suspect it will never happen.
[…] On the Bob Murphy Show: ep. 37 where I interview Dr. Keith Smith on how to secede from the current health care / insurance system, and ep. 39 where I interview […]