Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, brother of Rahm Emanuel (former White House Chief of Staff and current Mayor of Chicago), is an easy target for ridicule for a libertarian bioethicist.  Dr. Emanuel is a liberal communitarian who espouses a statist system of allocation of scarce health care resources.  Ron Shirtz, however, in an August 15 2009 article titled "Political Triage: The Creation of a Health Care Class System", has already accomplished the task.

Shirtz critiques Dr. Emanuel's infamous 2009 Lancet article in which the eminent madman advocates distribution of health care resources by the state  via "youngest-first allocation ... combined with prognosis and lottery principles in a multiprinciple allocation system."  What?  Shirtz rightly labels this scheme "a progressive-era eugenics manifesto."  

But Shirtz's primary contribution to my knowledge is his resurrection of a 1996 Hastings Center report authored by Dr. Emanuel.  This report reveals that Dr. Emanuel is a Platonist (and that is not a compliment).  Dr. Emanuel writes that " ... the just allocation of health care resources - can be addressed only by invoking a particular conception of the good ... that should inform policies on these nonconstitutional political issues."  To paraphrase, liberal communitarian philosopher doctors must advise the state on the "just" allocation of scarce health care resources based on a liberal communitarian pro-aggression philosophy that ignores individual beneficence, nonmaleficence, and autonomy.  Excuse me, Dr. Emanuel, but I have not, do not, and shall not consent to that tyranny.

I recommend Ron Shirtz's article.

I do not recommend Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

My friend Yuri Maltsev is the author of a disturbing article titled "What Soviet Medicine Teaches Us."  This consequentialist tour de force was published online as a Mises Daily essay on August 21, 2009.  I cannot forget the lessons imparted by Yuri in this short editorial.

In the article Yuri documents, from official sources and personal experience, the utter depravity of "the complete socialization of medicine."  Example #1: "According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals."  Example #2: "After seventy years of socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not have running not water, and 36 percent of hospitals located in rural areas of Russia did not have water or sewage at all."  Example #3: "At the end of the socialist experiment, the official infant-mortality rate in Russia was more than 2.5 times as high as in the United States and more than five times that of Japan."  These, and similar, facts are ignored by the proponents of coercive medicine in the United States.

What is the purpose of Yuri's article?  He is trying to warn Americans about the decivilizing consequences of coercive medicine.  Will we listen?         

"The Carriage-Trade Trend" is an article by Christopher Westley published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute website on August 01, 2001.  The essay describes physician secession from the fascist United States healthcare scheme via a 'concierge care' pricing system.  In 2011, 'concierge care' is commonly termed concierge medicine.  Concierge medicine is typically defined as a relationship between a primary care physician and a patient in which the patient pays an annual retainer or fee in exchange for enhanced physician care.  Concierge medicine is also known as direct care, boutique medicine, membership medicine, retainer-based medicine, or innovative medical practice design.  The interest of the Libertarian Bioethics Blog has been piqued by the brief analysis of Arthur Caplan's critique of 'concierge care' contained in Westley's discussion. 

Dr. Arthur Caplan is the director of the Center for Bioethics and Emmanuel and Robert Hart Professor of Bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania.  He is arguably the most famous living bioethicist.  Unfortunately, Professor Caplan apparently knows little about economics, for the comments attributed to him in the article betray extreme economic ignorance.  Caplan stupid quote #1: "We don't want our doctors to be frazzled or inattentive, which has happened by unleashing market forces with inadequate resources."  Caplan stupid quote #2: "But I'd hope we could create a system where the doctor could talk to me for more than a minute without a surcharge."

Westley skewers Caplan's economic ignorance by naming the true culprits in the fascist United States healthcare scheme.  The real criminals include the onerous regulatory state, socialization of the cost of medical services, the medical cartel constructed by the United States government and the American Medical Association, licensure laws, and the trial lawyer cult.  Dr. Caplan is seemingly oblivious to this truth.

Frankly, however, a plumbline libertarian does not expect a person who has served as the Chair of the National Cancer Institute Biobanking Ethics Working Group, the Advisory Committee to the Department of Health and Human Services on Blood Safety and Availability, and the Advisory Committee to the United Nations on Human Cloning and as a member of the special advisory panel to the National Institute of Mental Health on human experimentation on vulnerable subjects, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Gulf War Illnesses, and the special advisory committee to the International Olympic Committee on genetics and gene therapy to understand the fundamentals of economics.

Libertarian Bioethics Blog idea alert!  Surely the brilliant Dr. Caplan accepts birthday gifts.  Lessons for the Young Economist by Robert Murphy is the perfect choice.