Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Bostonian Economics

From Dr. David Gratzer in the Examiner:

In Boston, people can walk into a store and buy tobacco and alcohol. They can also purchase sugary soft drinks, high-fat foods and herbal medicines of dubious clinical use. If Mayor Thomas Menino gets his way, however, they will be unable to see a licensed health professional for a flu shot because it “jeopardizes patient safety.”

Vice, junk food and snake oils are OK, but the mayor has started a campaign to ban retailer-based walk-in clinics, reasoning that “allowing retailers to make money off of sick people is wrong.”

(HT: Olson) Do go read the whole thing and check out Walter’s other links.

I find Menino’s thinking - if you can call it that - incomprehensible. In the first place, the retailers aren’t trying to make money off sick people, they’re trying to make money keeping people from getting sick. We call that doing well while doing good. In the second, what the heck’s wrong with making “money off sick people”? It’s what doctors, pharmacists, grocery stores with first aid and health care aisles, dentists, nurses, and lots of other folks do. Heck, making money off sick people amounts to 15% of the US economy! Does Menino think all those folks should be working for free?

Or is this thinly veiled anti-competitive protection of doctor incomes? Gratzer explains:

At last year’s American Medical Association annual meeting, delegates declared war, claiming that the walk-in clinics were unsafe. They demanded national guidelines and state investigations into clinic operations.

Opposition from physicians groups kept MinuteClinic out of Rhode Island for a decade and slowed growth in other states, including Georgia. In the Bay State, the Massachusetts Medical Association protested, as did professional associations representing family physicians, hospitals, community health centers and pediatricians. Angry docs have found a partnership with politicians — like the Boston mayor — who are skeptical of markets.

Special interest + politician of any stripe = bad news for the little guy

but

Special interest + liberal politician who’s skeptical of free markets = really bad news for the little guy