Thomas Szasz on Socialism in Health Care

Szasz presents seven reasons why health care is becoming more and more expensive.

Thomas Szasz

Thomas Szasz is a psychiatrist and author well known for his criticism of the modern psychiatry movement. He has consistently sought to apply classical liberal principles (such as bodily and mental self ownership) to social science and also explored the consequences of mandatory institutionalization of persons the state deemed to be insane. In his book, The Myth of Mental Illness (1960), Szasz claims that psychiatry ultimately robs people of the responsibility of being moral agents by obscuring the difference between socially unacceptable behavior and disease.

The health care debate is fundamentally broken, argues the great psychiatry skeptic Thomas Szasz, because it assumes a flawed premise. Namely, that “diseases require treatment, so the thing to do is to avoid diseases so you don’t need treatment.” Szasz ties this to the problem of socialism in health care. Because of the way we think about disease, we have a health care system that removes control from individuals and gives it to state-​enabled doctors and insurance companies. In psychology, for example, “diseases are no longer defined by pathologists but are defined essentially by a political process.” This has lead to, among other things, more expensive health care. Szasz offers seven reasons why, many having to do with the way we think about disease, how it should be treated, and the relationship between citizens and medicine. Szasz spoke at the Future of Freedom 5th Anniversary Conference on September 25, 1994.