https://hugopfister.nl/tags/economics/ Recent content in Economics on Hugo Pfister Hugo en Hugo Pfister Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hugopfister.nl/posts/universal-healthcare-through-the-lens-of-austrian-economics/ Tue, 25 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000 https://hugopfister.nl/posts/universal-healthcare-through-the-lens-of-austrian-economics/ Drawing on Ludwig von Mises’s Human Action, this essay argues that a society’s moral commitment to universal healthcare access is a normative choice standing outside economics — but once made, it collides with the economic reality that healthcare remains scarce, specialized, and expensive to produce. When governments promise access regardless of wealth while still allowing providers to negotiate prices freely, the resulting tension doesn’t eliminate scarcity — it just relocates where that scarcity shows up, whether in reimbursement caps, wage pressure, waiting times, or rising taxes. The United States’ unusually high healthcare spending, driven more by price than by utilization, offers suggestive real-world evidence for this dynamic, illustrating that the real policy choice isn’t ‘market versus government’ but rather which mechanism a society uses to allocate an unavoidable scarcity — and who ends up bearing its cost.