The Supreme Court today upheld "Obamacare," a massive economic intervention ostensibly designed to cure the ills of American healthcare. Of course those ills were themselves caused by intervention, and this "cure" will only make the situation even worse. The "cycle of interventionism" Mises warned us about continues to intensify.

As Murray Rothbard wrote,

Our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.

We have put together this healthcare reading list so as to help the concerned citizen understand how we got where we are, and where we are likely headed if we continue on this path.

Articles

• "Government Medical 'Insurance'" by Murray Rothbard

• "Hospital of Cards" by Andrew Foy, MD

• "The Economics of US Healthcare" by Gilbert G. Berdine, MD

• "The Medical Marketplace, Free and Unfree"by Andrew Foy, MD

• "How the Experts Are Wrecking Healthcare" by Andrew Foy, MD

• "What's Really Wrong with the Healthcare Industry" by Vijay Boyapati

• "Healthcare Intervention: The Bigger Picture" by Doug French

• "New Regulations Will Destroy the Insurance Market" by Eric M. Staib

• "Obamacare is a Devastating Tax on the Working Class" by Eric M. Staib

• "A Petition from Producers of Everything Connected with Healthcare" by D. W. MacKenzie

• "Will Preventative Care Control Costs" by Eric M. Staib

• "Healthcare and Insurance on a Desert Island" by Gilbert G. Berdine, M.D.

• "American Healthcare Fascialism" by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

• "Can Government Fight Epidemics?"  by Eric M. Staib

• "No Such Thing as a Free Flu Shot"by Malte Tobias Kahler

• "The Wall Street Journal Defends the Predator State" by Robert P. Murphy

• "Malpractice on the Market" by Eric M. Staib

• "Understanding the Costs of Healthcare" by D.W. MacKenzie

• "Is Emergency Care a Failed Market?" by Eric M. Staib

• Involuntary Medical Servitude" by Maria Martins

• "What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us" by Yuri N. Maltsev

• "The Real Right to Medical Care versus Socialized Medicine" by George Reisman

• "A Four-Step Healthcare Solution" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe (Also in MP3)

• " Universal Coverage Means Suppressing Human Choice" by Eric M. Staib

• "Socialized Healthcare vs. The Laws of Economics" by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

• "Why Obamacare Can't Work: The Calculation Argument" by Gabriel E. Vidal

• " Private-Sector Health Care Leads the Way" by Chris Brown

• "The Relentless Process of Socializing Health Care" by D.W. MacKenzie (Also in MP3)

• "Why is Medical Care so Expensive" by Hans F. Sennholz

• "How Medical Boards Nationalized Health Care" by Henry Jones

• "Real Medical Freedom" by Dale Steinreich

• "100 Years of Medical Robbery" by Dale Steinreich

• "Health Care for All!" by Christopher Mayer

• "Health Care Interventionism: A Case Study"by Christopher Westley

• "'Bad Medicine' or Bad Economics?" by William L. Anderson

• "Canadian Health Care" by "Lucretius"

• "Why Health Insurance?" by Robert Blumen

Journals

• "Socialized Medicine, Take Two" by Jeffrey Herbener, The Free Market

• "Socialized Medicine in America" by Timothy D. Terrell, The Free Market

• Two Book Reviews by Dale Steinreich, Drury University, The Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics Vol. 9, No. 3 (Fall 2006): 75–85 (PDF)

  1. Lives at Risk: Single-Payer National Health Insurance Around The World. By John C. Goodman, Gerald L. Musgrave, Devon M. Herrick Lanham. Rowman and Littlefield, 2004.

  2. Miracle Cure: How to Solve America's Health Care Crisis and Why Canada Isn't the Answer. By Sally C. Pipes. San Francisco: Pacific Research Institute, 2004.

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Audio & Video

• "Health Economics" by Walter Block, Mises University, July 31, 2009 (MP3)

• "Economics of Risk and Insurance: From Healthcare to Welfare" by Hans-Hermann Hoppe, Mises University, July 29, 2009 (MP3)

• Mises Blog: "Health care: the government is the problem" (Video)