The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge

by Matt Ridley

Besides, it is simply a fact of life that health and education must be supplied by the state, because – well, why? Because the market is not prepared to step forward? Hardly. Because the market would cheat the ill-informed consumer? It does not do so in the case of food and clothing, at least not much. Because the market would supply only the wealthy? Again, food and clothing suggest otherwise, as does the history of the medical profession. In times past doctors often charged their wealthy clients more than their poor ones, using the former to subsidise the treatment of the latter. Before Medicaid and Medicare existed, writes the American politician and former doctor Ron Paul, ‘every physician understood that he or she had a responsibility towards the less fortunate, and free medical care for the poor was the norm’.