Milton Friedman on Medicine and health care
People will voluntarily pay their own money to go see a particular physician, but nobody likes to pay taxes for someone else to see a physician.
Context. From a talk to physicians, published in Private Practice in July 1981, on the trend toward government control of medicine and the prospects for reversing it. On why, once government has taken over medical care, fiscal pressure leads it to hold down spending.
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Cite this passage
Milton Friedman, “The Market and Human Freedom” (Private Practice (July 1981); reprinted in the Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, September 9, 1981, pp. 19996 to 19997, introduced by Representative Larry McDonald of Georgia as “Professor Friedman’s recent article on this subject” in “Private Practice magazine for July 1981”, 1981), Congressional Record, September 9, 1981, p. 19997. https://miltonfriedman.org/quotes/nobody-likes-pay-taxes-someone-else-physician-1981
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He also said
That is a widespread myth, that it is possible to spend money with nobody paying for it. You have everybody screaming that we ought to have new, bigger, more generous government programs. Where are we going to raise the money? Tax business. But business corporations can’t pay any taxes. A corporate executive may sign the check, but where does he get the money? From his stockholders or from his customers or from his employees. Unlike the federal government, he doesn’t have a printing press in his basement. So the only way he can pay money to the government is by imposing a burden on somebody. Government cannot spend money at nobody’s expense …
Economic Myths and Public OpinionColumn, 1976, The Alternative: An American Spectator, January 1976; reprinted in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 72Checked against the sourceFind the bookThe vested interests are not some big bad people sitting on money bags; the vested interests are you and me. Each of us is strongly in favor of small measures that will benefit us and each of us is not too strongly opposed to any one small measure that will benefit someone else. We are not going to vote anybody out of office because he imposes a $3 a year burden on us. Consequently, when each measure is considered separately, there is considerable pressure to pass it.
Context. From a 1978 Policy Review article on the tax-limitation movement, written the day after California voters approved Proposition 13 (the Jarvis-Gann amendment). Its opening reworks his April 1978 Newsweek column “A Progress Report”; the passages quoted from it here are from the later, new part of the argument.
The Limitations of Tax LimitationJournal article, 1978, Policy Review (The Heritage Foundation); reprinted in the Congressional Record, Extensions of Remarks, June 7, 1979, pp. 14069 to 14071, introduced by Representative Hamilton Fish, Jr. of New York as “an article by Dr. Friedman published in Policy Review, the quarterly journal of The Heritage Foundation”, Congressional Record, June 7, 1979, p. 14070Checked against the sourceRead the originalThis leads to my next myth—the myth that government can spend money at nobody’s expense. What was really involved in that last story was that somehow the local people do not pay out the money coming down from Washington, somebody else does. Of course, the truth is that the money makes a round trip between Florida and Washington, and there is a discount taken off for cash as it passes through Washington. Some of you may remember that wonderful description of government by the French economist, Frederic Bastiat, who said that government is that fiction whereby everybody believes that he can live at the expense of everybody else.
Economic Myths and Public OpinionColumn, 1976, The Alternative: An American Spectator, January 1976; reprinted in Bright Promises, Dismal Performance (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), p. 72Checked against the sourceFind the book
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