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Why Socialized Healthcare is a VERY Bad Idea

SONIA BENNETT MURRAY explains why National Health Care isn't the answer in her letter to the editor.

For those who think National Health is a panacea for our ills - it is not! When anything is "free" it goes downhill, overused and understaffed. With salaries for doctors and nurses fixed by a bureaucracy, too few young people are willing to spend long years of their lives in training to enter these intensely demanding professions. Medical care, like anything else, is rationed by availability.

Canada has National Health. Why do you think so many Canadians cross the border to get care?

She is absolutely correct. For further reading
The Problems with Socialized Healthcare
Socialized Medicine: The Canadian Experience as Pierre Lemieux points out socialized medicine isn't really "free". The first thing to realize is that free healthcare isn't really free.

What the consumer doesn't pay, the taxpayer does, and with a vengeance. Public health expenditures in Quebec amount to 29 per cent of the provincial government budget. One-fifth of the revenues come from a wage tax of 3.22 per cent charged to employers and the rest comes from general taxes at the provincial and federal levels. It costs $1,200 per year in taxes for each Quebec citizen to have access to the public health system. This means that the average two-child family pays close to $5,000 per year in public health insurance. This is much more expensive than the most comprehensive private health insurance plan.

Then there is the law of supply and demand to deal with.

When prices are zero, demand exceeds supply, and queues form. For many Canadians, hospital emergency rooms have become their primary doctor -- as is the case with Medicaid patients in the United States. Patients lie in temporary beds in emergency rooms, sometimes for days. At Sainte-Justine Hospital, a major Montreal pediatric hospital, children often wait many hours before they can see a doctor. Surgery candidates face long waiting lists -- it can take six months to have a cataract removed. Heart surgeons report patients dying on their waiting lists. But then, it's free. Or is it? The busy executive, housewife, or laborer has more productive things to do besides waiting in a hospital queue. For these people, waiting time carries a much higher cost than it does to the unemployed single person. So, if public health insurance reduces the costs of health services for some of the poor, it increases the costs for many other people. It discriminates against the productive. One clear effect of a socialized health system is to increase the cost of getting above-average care (while the average is dropping). Some poor people, in fact, may obtain better care under socialized medicine. But many in the middle class will lose. It isn't clear where justice is to be found in such a redistribution.

Please read this entire article Lemieux makes several good points. Now back to the list for further reading
THE CATO INSTITUE FIVE MYTHS OF SOCIALIZED MEDICINE.

A Hard Lesson About Socialized Medicine

For many years advocates of government-run health care pointed to Europe as an ideal, noting that America was the "only industrialized country without a national health care system." Now, however, the European welfare states are slashing benefits in the face of rising health care costs. A recent front-page story in the New York Times detailed the European cutbacks. According to the article, Britain, France and Germany are all being forced to limit access to care. Rationing, already extensive, is increasing.

The case against socialized health care
Written by: Beck

Furthermore, quality of health care will rapidly deteriorate. Every nation that has implemented universal health care--every single one--has seen the quality of health care provided decline. The reason for this is that with the government providing the insurance policies, it falls to the government to regulate the rates at which they will reimburse medical practitioners. Left with no choice but to lose money or cut corners, hospitals will cut corners. The problems caused by many homos skimpy coverage and draconian cost control measures will promptly infect the entire health care system from top to bottom. While I would hope that the US wouldn't make Canada's mistake of requiring patients to use the public health system, thereby preventing the wealthy "line-jumping" (an idiotic concept rooted in egalitarian notions that everyone should receive the same sub-standard quality of service regardless of what they can pay), the impact on all but the highest-end of health care providers will find itself stuck under government health care cost structuring.

Socialized healthcare and The Road To Serfdom By Nikhil Rao
So before you jump on the national healthcare bandwagon consider carefully.

Do you really want to be taxed in order to pay for a strangers healthcare?
Do you want the government telling you when you can see a doctor?
Do you want long lines at the doctors office and a waiting list for surgery?
Do you want your healthcare rationed by the government?

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