Dark side of market forces

In response to “New approaches to health care are sorely needed,” Aug. 5. One has to being willing to plow through all of Sue Lani Madsen’s glib truisms (e.g., “Nobody wants to kill people by taking away their health insurance”) to get to the false core underlying her thinking at the very end of her political piece misplaced in the Northwest news section of the paper.

Her conclusion about new approaches to health care reads, “Market forces will always better meet individual needs than centralized planning.” You bet, just like all those years when unregulated market forces best met the needs of the population of this nation. The only needs that were met were those of owners of tobacco companies and funeral parlors.

Morally, rationally and, incidentally, economically, no society is best served by permitting and encouraging one subset of the population to profit at the expense of another by whatever means, even under the banner of “freedom.”

Peter Grossman

Spokane