Former U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was in Louisville Saturday night stumping for socialized medicine with an analogy that doesn't hold up under any serious scrutiny:
"Elders called on President-elect Barack Obama and Congress to overhaul the health-care system to provide coverage for all, despite the potential cost to taxpayers."
""They say we can't afford it," she said, when "in one month we got $700 billion for Wall Street.""
Right. And how well is that working out so far, Joycelyn?
Besides, as the Cato Institute's Michael Cannon points out, we already have enough government control of healthcare to see widespread negative effects:
"Consider two distinguishing features of socialist economies. The first is that the government decides what individuals may produce, what they consume, and the terms of exchange."
"That is largely true of America's health care system. Government controls production and consumption by determining the number of physicians; what services medical professionals can offer and under what terms; where they can practice; who can open a hospital or purchase a new MRI; who can market a drug or medical device; and what kind of health insurance consumers may purchase."
"Government bureaucrats even set the prices for half of our health care sector directly, and indirectly set prices for the other half. When you read about Medicare over-paying imaging centers and hospitals, or that it's impossible for Bostonians to get an appointment with a general practitioner, it's largely because the bureaucrats got the prices wrong, and those rigid prices do not automatically eliminate shortages and gluts like flexible market prices do."
"A second feature of socialist economies is that there is little incentive to make careful economic decisions, because government has put everyone in the position of spending other people's money."
"Canada may have the most heavily socialized health care system in the advanced world. Yet America's system is as much a tragedy of the commons as the Canadian system, where health care is ostensibly "free." In each country, only about 14 cents out of every dollar of medical spending comes directly from the patient."
"How can America's health care system be "socialized" when we rely on the private sector more than any advanced nation? Because it doesn't matter whether the dollars and the hospitals are owned publicly or privately. What matters is who controls how they are used."
Just as the banking bailout shouldn't persuade anyone to further expand government's role in healthcare, reality should inform us to pursue free-market reforms instead of continuing to hope that a little bit more socialism will suddenly start to work.
2 comments:
When 43 million have no health insurance, that's a failure on the part of government. Our founders envisioned better. Thomas Jefferson wrote:
"The care of human life and happiness and not their destruction is the first and only legitimate object of good government."
Need I remind you that the military, Congress and Medicare are examples of government provided healthcare.
The military is closest to socialized medicine. You have to go to the doctor that's available.
Under Medicare, you go to the doctor of your own choosing.
Under American private sector healthcare, you go to their approved doctors. You take their approved "formulary" prescriptions. If your doctor prescribes something that's outside their "network" they balk at paying for it.
And forget getting private sector healthcare if you have a pre-existing condition. Or if you have a mental illness. Private sector healthcare prefers to assume that these people will "just snap out of it." For years, private sector healthcare balked at even paying for brain disorders that they prefer to call "mental illness."
Private sector healthcare is an unnecessary and expensive middleman that needs to be eliminated.
Those moneys could better be directed into a federal single-payor healthcare system that could be patterned like Medicare.
If additional revenues are needed, there are numerous untapped sources of revenue that go relatively tax free. Start with the derivatives market; stock and speculation transactions; bundled mortgages; and don't forget the drug money that banks launder.
One of Cato Institute's distinguishing failures is its inability to even look for viable alternatives or consider anything that might be consistent with American values.
hempy,
the difference between the military and government provided health care is that a military is clearly called for in the Constitution. Medicare, Social Security, Welfare, and socialized medicine are not. The government is not to blame for people not having health insurance, but as CATO said, driving the cost up.
If the middle man causes medical care to be so expensive, then why has competition not come in and dropped the profit down? My insurance company, Humana (which is painted as the most evil in Michael Moore's movie, Sicko) has profit margins of 2.58%... Wal-Mart, one of the lowest cost producers (and arguably, by far the most efficient) out there operates on larger margins.
I am also shocked that having a single payer system, which would create a monopoly of sorts, should ever be thought of as a good thing. Competition causes there to be a need for innovation, cost savings, and efficiency. Why would anyone ever be against that?
In addition, taxing gains on stocks is not only wealth destroying for all Americans, but is also a double taxation on the owners of the business-the stock holders who have money in their retirement plans.
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