On 2011-03-08 01:29, kcg5 wrote:

Quote:

On 2011-03-07 23:11, gdw wrote:
And americans feared the so called "death panels."

Idiots did.

On 2011-03-08 08:24, tommy wrote:
I am not sure what your point is. What are you saying should have been done?

An old joke runs, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice there is.” Nowhere is the gulf between theory and practice more clear than in socialized medical systems around the world. Why is this the case, and what can Americans learn from this?

Advocates of government-run “universal” healthcare claim that it provides patients with the medical care they need in a timely, efficient fashion, without concern for ability to pay. However, a closer examination of these supposed utopias of government-run healthcare in Canada and Europe reveals the exact opposite.

According to the Vancouver-based Fraser Institute, “Canadian doctors say patients wait almost twice as long for treatment than is clinically reasonable, almost eighteen weeks between the time they see their family physician and the time they receive treatment from a specialist.”

These long waits for medical care naturally result in worse outcomes. A Canadian woman who discovers a lump in her breast might wait several months before she receives the surgery and chemotherapy she needs, while the cancer cells continue to multiply. If she lived in the United States, she could receive treatment within days.

David Gratzer, a doctor who practiced in Canada before moving to the United States, notes similar results for other cancers:

For men, the bladder cancer survival rate in the United States is 15 percent higher than the European average. With prostate cancer, the gap is even larger: 28 percent. For American women, the uterine cancer survival rate is 5 percent higher than the European average; for breast cancer, it is 14 percent higher. The United States has survival rates of 90 percent or higher for five cancers (skin melanoma, breast, prostate, thyroid, and testicular), but there is only one cancer for which the European survival rate reaches 90 percent (testicular). Lung cancer, once considered a death sentence, now has better survival rates over five years—and Americans do better than Europeans, 16 percent versus 11 percent.

Nor does socialized medicine guarantee equal access to care. Lee Kurisko, a physician who also practiced in both Canada and the U.S., notes that Canadians with political “pull” routinely use their clout to “jump the queue” and receive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and specialized surgeries ahead of ordinary Canadians with greater medical need. Access to healthcare in Canada remains unequal, but based on political favoritism rather than ability to pay—something Kurisko calls the “deep, dark secret” of Canadian medicine.

So what explains these failures of socialized medicine?

The central premise behind socialized medicine is that governments should attempt to provide healthcare according to the Marxist principle, “From each according to his ability; to each according to his need.” However, whenever the government attempts to guarantee a service such as healthcare, it must necessarily also control it—if only to control costs.

In practice, this means government bureaucrats must decide what sorts of medical procedures are “cost effective,” what drugs people may receive, and what services doctors may provide.

In the United Kingdom, a government committee—the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE)—decides which treatments are sufficiently cost effective to be used by the National Health Service. If a British patient with terminal cancer requires a drug not on the government’s approved list, he or she is out of luck. Similarly, the Canadian government strictly regulates how many MRI machines may operate in a given area; the natural result is long waits for a limited number of openings. Socialized medicine naturally leads to government rationing of healthcare.

Contrast that with the American system. America is not fully capitalist—but rather a mixed economy with some capitalist and some socialist elements. But where we have allowed capitalism to operate, the result has been a remarkable explosion in productivity and prosperity—not only in healthcare, but throughout the economy. Americans don’t debate how best to ration cell phones for the poor because capitalism has made these once-expensive products easily affordable to nearly everyone.

Under genuine laissez-faire capitalism, as advocated by thinkers such as Ayn Rand, the government’s sole legitimate function is to protect individual rights. Rights can only be violated by force, fraud, or the threat thereof. Hence, a proper government protects us from criminals such as murderers, thieves and con men, as well as from aggressors abroad. But it otherwise leaves honest men alone to live peacefully.

Under capitalism, individuals are free to produce and trade with others—or not—according to their best judgment for their mutual benefit. To thrive, producers must therefore constantly compete to produce goods and services that others find valuable, resulting in a virtuous cycle of competition, innovation, and prosperity.

Similarly, the “natural laboratories” of capitalism versus socialism such as West Germany versus East Germany, South Korea versus North Korea, or Hong Kong versus communist China, consistently show that freer, more capitalistic societies give rise to greater prosperity and happiness.

In the realm of healthcare, America’s partial capitalism has allowed U.S. doctors and scientists to lead the world in discovering new drugs and inventing new medical devices—because they still retain enough freedom to innovate and to profit from their successes.

In contrast, socialized medicine fails because socialism strangles the freedom, innovation, and prosperity required for modern medicine. Socialism chains men to one another—thus dragging all down together. In contrast, capitalism frees men to prosper and rise according to their own ability and effort—thus benefiting us all.

Many who lived under socialism understood this well, as illustrated by an old joke from behind the Iron Curtain:

“Under capitalism, man exploits his fellow man; under socialism, it’s the other way around!”

If being exploited means being able to schedule an MRI appointment for myself in twenty-four hours with my iPad using the free WiFi at the local coffee shop while sipping on a latte, rather than waiting six months on a government waiting list, I’ll take the capitalist version of exploitation any day.