How bad can health care get? There’s no answer to that question except to say that its deterioration is only limited by our ability to recognize it. When I lived in America, I paid for medical insurance and more or less got what I paid for. Now that I live in Israel, I get the worst medical care that money can’t buy and I’m surrounded by six million people who are thrilled with the experience.
Here is someone else with the wool pulled over her eyes, praising the NHS:
However, healthcare works in many more cases than it doesn’t. It is undoubtedly and definitely better than nothing if you need help.
Holy fuck, I don’t even know where to begin. How about…
The question isn’t whether the NHS, or socialized medicine anywhere, saves people’s lives or doesn’t save people’s lives: of course it does. The question is whether it is as effective at saving lives as market-driven medicine: of course it’s not. “Healthcare works in many more cases than it doesn’t” is practically tautologous; all it says is that socialized medicine is better than no medicine at all.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Heh, I can see why that article gave you the wrong impression. I’ve talked about why socialised medicine doesn’t work before:
http://www.corrupt.org/news/the_myth_of_free_health_care#comment-4040
Ah, I knew we were on the same team: having gone from America’s mixed public-private health care system to Israel’s public-only (almost) system, I know that your analysis is right.
But I still disagree with one thing:
The central question is how to allocate the health care that’s being produced by the medical system. The reason governments can’t do this job is that they have no mechanism to figure out the value of one good or service versus another, to one person or another. Money is the market’s mechanism for assigning value and allocating scarce resources; unfortunately, expanding the amount of money in an economy (inflation) without increasing the amount of goods and services produced just means that everything will have a higher nominal price, with the additional negative effect that the first recipients of the new money – the government’s favored class, if government controls the money supply – will be able to obtain goods and services at close to the low old prices, while people who don’t receive government payments will have to pay the high new prices. Even worse, an unlimited money supply or one approaching it (hyperinflation) will make it impossible to assign value to anything, and people will stop offering goods and services for sale. Today, doctors tend to be reasonably well compensated for the work they perform. But if tomorrow they’re offered worthless paper for it, they’ll stop doing it, and every one of us will suffer and many of us will die – including me.
While I know that your idea of money growing on trees was at least partly facetious, I actually cherish money’s scarcity.