Politicians and the Promise of Free Healthcare
Thomas Sowell, the brilliant economist, has some important things to say in his latest article. He especially well-explained something I've tried to get advocates of socialized medicine to understand for quite some time now, stating that:
[t]he big political crusade today is for "affordable" medical care through the government. No one believes that government is just going to be more efficient, and thereby have lower costs that will be reflected in lower prices for medications and medical treatment.
It might seem as if adding the costs of government bureaucracies to the costs of medications and medical treatment would make it impossible for the total costs to go down. But again, the impossible is no problem in politics.
Many countries around the world already have government-run medical care. People who get sick in these countries usually wait much longer to get treatment, including months on waiting lists for surgery, often paying in pain or debilitation, rather than money.
High-tech medical devices like MRIs are also far less common in these countries than in the United States. With medical care as with anything else, you can always get poorer quality at a lower price, though that is no bargain, especially when you are sick.
What you may have in mind are lower prices with no reduction in quality. While that may be impossible, don't expect that fact to stop politicians from offering it, even if they can't deliver.
Right on. Despite the true words of Mr. Sowell, the sad fact is that some people actually do suggest that government action is more efficient than private action. This doesn't hold water, however, when you consider the terrible incentives built into government action as compared to those of the private sector. The private sector generally has an incentive to reduce costs while improving quality. A business that fails to attract customers and maintain a healthy bottom line will find itself wiped out, replaced by another company that can manage those things properly. In contrast, government doesn't need to be cost effective or concerned with quality - it has no bottom line to worry about, and it has no fear of customers going somewhere else when it is the only player in town. If the government's particular scheme fails, it can fall back on its taxing power. Instead, government generally tends to placate enough voters in order to ensure re-election. This is not a good model for a business. While socialized medicine advocates dream of a world of low-cost, high-quality care available to all, socialized medicine actually produces a world with intolerably long waits for necessary surgery and rationing of care for suspect reasons. Lacking the knowledge inherent in a pricing mechanism, to the extent government lowers costs, it will do so by arbitrarily reducing equipment and services and by paying healthcare professionals less than they're worth. This can do nothing but lower the quality of the health care administered to the public.
Invariably, this disparity of incentives never convinces the anointed. Instead, they insist that nothing is more efficient than a euphemistically dubbed "single-payer" system, where no competition is allowed. Under that rationale, we might as well discard all of the free market, along with that pesky thing called "democracy." In a certain sense, there's nothing more efficient than a totalitarian state. And yet, that institution invariably breeds inefficiency due to its monolithic status.
Ultimately, let's do the right thing. Instead of calling for more and more positive rights that have no basis in law or government, lets return to that simple American ideal: freedom. Freedom to work, freedom to choose, and freedom to enjoy the fruits of your own labor or choose to dispose of those fruits as you see fit.
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- Conservative Authoritarianism
- David Frum Is Wrong
