The Free Market in Medical Care

About the Book

The most prominent theme of “Take Back Our Health Care” is the restoration of a genuine free market in medical care—not the “market” touted by corporations, but a market more akin to the traditional free market and to the systems of Greek and Medieval medical care. The amazing scientific and technological advances in medicine and the effect of those advances changed the role of physicians and increased the costs of care. Increased governmental and corporate control of medicine threatens us all. A genuinely free market is described, as well as the challenges facing those markets. Doctors are in the position of Aesculapius, who, in the cover graphic, represents medicine. His choice is between mercury (merchants) and the three graces (medicine, hygiene, and panacea). Aesculapius treated patients; merchants make deals with clients. The book focuses on the solution.

About the Author

Leo Ray Ingle, MD, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the eldest of five brothers. He graduated from Indiana University Medical School in 1967. Following an internship in Mobile, Alabama, with two physician friends, he established a family practice clinic in Bessemer, Alabama. He was an early member of the American Academy of Emergency Physicians, heading a busy emergency room team in Birmingham, Alabama. Following a psychiatry residency at Tulane University, he relocated to California, where, with extensive sojourns in Alaska and Montana, he has practiced psychiatry since. This book is his small effort to “give back” to medicine, a lifelong passion.