Peter Schiff for Senate?

The Atlantic has the whole story here, but a choice quote is below: (H/T Shepard Humphries)

The solution to health care is the same solution to anything -- the same way we have a solution to clothing or food. It's the free market; its' individual entrepreneurs; it's competition; it's the profit motive; it's the invisible hand; it's everything that made this country great. We need to get government out of health care so we can bring private market forces back into it, and we can have individuals empowered to make their own choices, let doctors compete on quality and on price. And we can do that if we roll back government. But if we go in the direction of the Obama administration, we're gonna compound the problem. We'll gonna drive health care costs even higher, and we're gonna drive quality lower.

First, in the real world, the only way we can empower people to make informed choices on their health care is to send everyone to medical school. I think this might drive health care costs higher. And if people can't make informed choices, then competition is a sham.

The second problem is that no matter how much you empower someone with an expensive, chronic, and life-threatening disease to make choices, they aren't going to be able to afford the treatment. Which means that either healthy people are going to have to help pay for sick people, or we are going to let sick people die.

There really is no way around this. There is literally no example, ever, of a modern, workable health care system that does not involve redistribution of income.

And there is literally no example, ever, anywhere, except in fiction and the Chicago Boys textbooks, of a true free-market economy that works.

There just isn't.

Also, reread this part:

The solution to health care is the same solution to anything -- the same way we have a solution to clothing or food. It's the free market; its' individual entrepreneurs; it's competition; it's the profit motive; it's the invisible hand; it's everything that made this country great.

I'm sorry, but this is just lazy thinking. It's taking a theory, namely, Adam Smith's theory of the invisible hand, and deciding, against all the available evidence, that it should be applied to every situation in which any good or service needs to be allocated. It's reflexive, at this point. Schiff is explicitly saying that the solution to any problem is to use a free market. According to him, there is no need to actually analyze the particular problem at hand. Whatever it is, a free market will fix it. And this is done even though economists have known-since the advent of the railroad industry and the resulting dominance of long-term fixed capital-that truly free markets often lead to undesirable outcomes.

If Peter Schiff wants to make an empirical argument for using markets to reform health care, I will listen. But as long as he continues to rely on a 200 year-old theory that's based on a make-believe world, then I will assume that he is just full of shit.