Why Trust the Government with our Health?
Richard Kennedy
Editorial Page Editor  “Universal Healthcare” has been a tenet
of left leaning parties since the early 1900’s. To many, the
question isn’t how you can agree with free healthcare for all,
but how you couldn’t agree with it. Free health care for everyone,
regardless of socioeconomic status, sounds great on paper or in a
stump speech. But in reality, socialized medicine may end up hurting
more
people than it helps.
In Britain, which has a socialized medicine system, according to the Guardian
Unlimited, half of all patients waited 4 or more months to receive medical treatment,
while a staggering 16% of patients waited over a year for medical treatment.
In Canada, a man actually made an appointment to get an MRI scan at a veterinary
clinic under the name Fido, since Canada still had a free market veterinary health
care system. This act of desperation was to avoid an eight-month wait for an
MRI, a simple task that can be done within days in the United States.
Of greater concern to the majority of citizens is the wait time for emergency
rooms, which can be agonizingly long. Here in the United States, the average
wait, according to the CDC, is around an hour, which most people would consider
long. However, in Great Britain the government recently adopted a 4-hour “guarantee” that
any patient will be treated within four hours of arrival. The one-hour wait
time most Americans see now could easily be bumped up to four hours with socialized
medicine, and possibly even farther. It is scary to think that it one day may
be possible for a four hour wait to be considered a model of efficiency. In
Canada,
a boy with Asthma recently died, when he was refused entry into his local ER,
since it was full. The ER was in fact, full of patients who simply had the
cold or flu, but refused to wait the 5 weeks required to meet with a physician.
According
the New York Times, 20% of heart attack patients entering Vancouver General
Hospital have to wait over an hour for treatment, as opposed to the United
States, where
heart attack victims rarely wait more than 15 minutes.
Clearly, the strongest argument against socialized medicine is that people
who keep themselves healthy and make smart choices should not be forced to
pay for
the medical care of others. In socialist countries, citizens who are very healthy
and only go into the doctor’s office for a yearly checkup are forced
to help pay for the medical treatment of others who drink, smoke or are obese.
Some
people, in fact, believe that they do not need any healthcare, and would rather
stay out of the system altogether; instead these people are unwillingly forced
to pay for the treatment of others. In a socialist state, this can lead to
destruction of rights, as people can be banned from smoking or eating too much
to avoid the
state having to pay their lofty medical bills.
Many people lack faith in the free market, but the free market is definitely
more effective then the government. Government workers have rock solid jobs,
and have no incentive to work harder, while workers at private healthcare companies
have serious opportunity for promotion and therefore work harder to please
their customers; or risk losing their jobs. Private companies must compete
for customers’ business
by keeping prices low, something that is forgotten with a government monopoly
on healthcare. Finally, keeping healthcare private prevents the government from
being able to screw up something as important as one’s life, in the same
way that politicians mess up everything.
Albert Einstein once said that, “Insanity is doing the same things over
and over and expecting different results”. With Universal Healthcare
systems running into so much trouble in Great Britain, Canada, France and Germany,
why
should we believe that trying socialized medicine here would be any more effective?
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