Our Malady: Lessons in Liberty from a Hospital Diary

by Timothy Snyder

what is profitable is not what is healthy.

Doctors are not perfect, as I have had occasion to note. But in a better system a poor doctor becomes a mediocre one, a mediocre doctor becomes decent, a decent one becomes good, and a good one becomes outstanding.

If we gave doctors the authority they deserve, we would all be healthier and freer. Huge medical groups should be broken up by antitrust legislation.

free country, we are to understand, is one where ever fewer people extract ever more wealth from ever sicker American bodies. This is a lie.

It is ludicrous to claim that our present system is cost effective. We pay far more for health care than do people in comparable countries, and we get far less. A failure in public health, the coronavirus epidemic, cost taxpayers trillions of dollars and crushed the entire economy. Let us remember that.

A market economy such as ours works better when people are cared for. If it is liberty that we want, then we do not sacrifice human freedom to market dogma, but rather make markets work for freedom. The most influential of the market economists, Friedrich Hayek, opposed oligopoly, or ownership by a few, which he compared to Soviet central planning. Our medical-industrial complex is a set of oligopolies.

I spent nights with Lucinda Williams, listening to Car Wheels on a Gravel Road.

For me gravel roads are about coming back, the rattle and rumble of rubber on rock announcing a return, a recovery.

I am still angry: not so much for myself as for all of us. We deserve freedom, and we need medicine that works.