I keep criticizing politician and others in the policy debates over health care that medicine doesn’t belong in a free market model. I’ve argued this for years and so has one of the foremost health economists in the nation — and a very long time ago. Here is a quote from his obit in the New York Times.

“A new language is infecting the culture of American medicine,” Dr. Rashi Fein, a health economist who died in Boston Sept. 8, wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine in 1982. “It is the language of the marketplace, of the tradesman, and of the cost accountant. It is a language that depersonalizes both patients and physicians and describes medical care as just another commodity. It is a language that is dangerous.”