Have you ever wondered why you can’t talk to your doctor by phone or by email? Or why a doctor can’t examine you in your own home using a phone app? Or why specialists at our top hospitals aren’t using telemedicine for long-distance examinations of patients all over the country? Or why it’s so hard to combine ordinary health insurance with a concierge doctor?

In each of these cases normal market processes have been suppressed by unwise government policies.

And, that’s just the beginning. It turns out that the most serious problems in the health care marketplace are almost always the result of ill-conceived public policies. Yet this observation is very rarely made in health policy circles.

For most of the past half century, health economics has been dominated by the idea that private sector medicine has numerous flaws—flaws that must be corrected by government.