This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Mortal Peril: Our Inalienable Right to Health Care? by Richard A. Epstein, 503 pp, $27.50, ISBN 0-201-13647-3, New York, NY, Addison-Wesley, 1997.

JAMA. 1998;279:330-331.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Mortal Peril is the Don Quixote of free market economics. Like Cervantes' eponymous novel of a late 16th-century would-be knight errant, whose immersion in chilvaric romance led him to see windmills as threatening giants, reality as depicted in Mortal Peril is colored by immersion in microeconomic theory. Don Quixote's hapless heroic adventures were redeemed by his vision of righting injustice. The injustice that Richard Epstein identifies in the health care system is not the fact that more than 40 million are without health insurance. Rather, Epstein, professor of law at the University of Chicago, sees "mortal peril" in virtually all government regulation of health care.

Mortal Peril summarizes a simplified libertarian theory of law in which personal autonomy and freedom of contract are the supreme goods. The book's value lies in focusing attention on the theoretical principles that drive health policy decisions. Epstein's basic autonomy model "allows all individuals and . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?