Imagine Congress passes the “There Is Such a Thing as a Free Lunch Act” (TISFATLA). The law is simple and well-intentioned: No American should go hungry during the workday. Therefore, any restaurant that chooses to remain open between 10:30 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. must provide a nutritious lunch, defined as at least 500 calories of balanced food (protein, vegetables, whole grains, etc.) to anyone who walks in and requests it, without regard to their ability to pay, insurance status, or how many times they’ve eaten there that week.
Restaurants aren’t completely cornered. They can still raise prices on breakfast and dinner, seek government subsidies, reduce portion sizes, shorten hours, or even close during lunch. But they must serve first and ask questions later, or face steep fines (tens of thousands of dollars per violation) and possible loss of their operating license.
What Happens Next?
Immediate effects: Lines snake around the block. Demand surges because the price at the point of service is zero. Office workers, students, tourists, and predictably frequent diners treat the restaurant as their new daily cafeteria. A tiny fraction of “super-users” (maybe 1–2% of customers) begin consuming 10% or more of all free lunches. One motivated individual might rack up 20–30 meals a month. Why stop? It’s “free.”
Restaurants respond as any business would: they raise breakfast and dinner prices sharply to cover losses, cut quality, shrink portions, and reduce staff. Some simply stop serving lunch altogether, shrinking overall supply and making the remaining spots even more crowded. Wait times balloon to an hour or more. Working people who can’t stand in line during their short break go hungry—not because they lack money, but because the queue rations access.
The Government’s “Solution”: More Rules
Instead of admitting the law created perverse incentives, policymakers declare the problem is “greedy restaurants” exploiting loopholes. So Congress and regulators respond with layer after layer of new rules to “fix” the distortions:
- Restaurants must now document every free lunch with detailed nutritional logs, customer affidavits of need, and proof that the meal met exact caloric and macronutrient guidelines.
- They have to submit monthly reports to a new federal “Lunch Equity Commission” showing how many free meals were served, to whom, and at what cost.
- To prevent “abuse,” restaurants must implement a national “Lunch Eligibility Verification System” that cross-checks customers against a government database— but they still must serve first and verify later.
- New mandates require “culturally appropriate” options, allergy accommodations, and sustainability standards for ingredients.
Complying with this exploding regulatory thicket isn’t cheap. Restaurants now have to hire entire new departments of billing specialists, compliance officers, nutrition auditors, and paperwork clerks just to navigate the rules and avoid ruinous fines. These added administrative costs get passed on through even higher dinner prices, smaller portions, or reduced service quality. Some smaller restaurants simply give up and close.
The result? The original promise of “free lunch” has morphed into a vast, expensive bureaucracy that employs more people pushing paper than actually cooking food. Meanwhile, lunch lines remain long, quality has declined, dinner prices have skyrocketed, and fewer restaurants are willing to stay open during the mandated hours. Everyone begins complaining that the nation’s “restaurant system” is broken. Why, in Europe, people just walk in and buy lunch without waiting!
The EMTALA Parallel Is Striking
This cycle is not hypothetical, it’s exactly how EMTALA and the broader healthcare regulatory regime have evolved. A hospital shows up with a possible emergency? Screen and stabilize first, payment questions later. When uncompensated care piles up and emergency departments become overcrowded with frequent flyers (a small group of patients driving a wildly disproportionate share of visits and ambulance runs), the response isn’t to revisit the zero-price mandate. Instead, we get more rules: ever-stricter documentation, quality metrics, electronic health record mandates, billing codes, prior authorizations, and compliance layers.
Hospitals and physician groups respond by hiring armies of coders, billers, compliance staff, and administrators. U.S. healthcare now spends roughly 25–30% of total dollars on administrative overhead — far more than in most other countries. That bureaucracy doesn’t deliver care; it manages the distortions created by mandates, price controls, and third-party payment systems. The original goal of helping people in genuine need gets buried under mountains of paperwork, while costs keep rising and access problems (long waits, boarded patients, specialist shortages) persist.
The Deeper Lesson
When someone tries to use jury duty, court-appointed lawyers, or judges as justification for forcing doctors and hospitals to provide “free” healthcare, they’re missing (or ignoring) this dynamic. The justice system obligations are narrow constitutional protections against government abuse of its own punitive power. EMTALA-style mandates in medicine are open-ended entitlements that conscript private resources and then breed ever-more-complex regulation to manage the inevitable shortages and abuses.
There is no free lunch, just as there is no free healthcare. Every attempt to create one through mandates simply shifts the costs (to paying customers, taxpayers, or future patients) and grows a parasitic administrative class that feeds on the resulting complexity. The compassionate impulse to help the needy is better served by increasing real supply: more doctors, fewer barriers to entry, price transparency, and targeted aid, rather than layering on rules that make the system slower, more expensive, and less responsive to actual human needs.
The problem is one of intelligence. How do you create more doctors, nurses, and other medical personnel without lowering standards? Medicine (and advanced nursing) is cognitively demanding. It requires high fluid intelligence, strong working memory, pattern recognition, and the ability to integrate massive amounts of complex information under pressure. Multiple studies put the average IQ of physicians around 120–130 (roughly the 90th–98th percentile of the population). That’s not an accident or a gatekeeping artifact; it’s what the work demands. You can’t mass-produce doctors the way you can produce more Uber drivers or retail workers without either lowering standards or hitting the natural limits of the talent pool.
There are ways to increase the number of health care workers, and we can discuss that in a later post.
In case you are wondering, this post was written because of this guy:
