Questing for Atlantis

Michael Moore. Hillary Clinton. The Daily Kos crowd. They’re all screaming for universal health care, or as some prefer to call it, socialized medicine.

They bemoan the high cost of prescription drugs and the number of uninsured in America. They point north to Canada or east to Britain and demand we follow their example and use the power of Big Government to try and cure the supposed problems of a market economy and the profit motive.

But before the nation rushes headlong down that path, it needs to take a cold, sober look at what is really involved. That examination involves two distinct components. One, what is the reality of socialized medicine elsewhere in the world? Two, what is the reality of OUR current system?

In the form of Canada and the UK there are two perfect examples of socialized medicine for Americans to examine. Both maintain the common feature of a mandate that health insurance be purchased, but in the implementation there are significant differences. Canada has what is referred to as a single-payer system; the government not only mandates that everyone purchase insurance, but it has made it illegal for any entity but the government to provide it. The UK offers a type of multi-payer system, where high tax rates are used to fund a so-called safety net, and people then have the option of purchasing insurance for procedures beyond it. These two options, and variations of them have all been proposed in America, but what are the real results?

As a CATO study reveals, doctors in the UK and Canada see 50% more patients than their U.S. counterparts. This means they spend significantly less time with each patient and as a result, they get understandably lesser results.

In fact, “Among people with chronic renal failure, only half as many Canadians as Americans get dialysis, and only a third as many Britons on a per capita basis. The American rate of coronary bypass surgeries is three or four times what it is in Canada, and five times what it is in Britain.”

When it comes to cancer, only 1 in 5 women diagnosed with breast cancer die in America compared to almost 1 in every 2 in the UK. For men with prostate cancer, the death rate is less than twenty percent in the U.S., but twenty-five percent in Canada and more fifty percent in the UK.

This is not to say that there are no problems in the American system. Massive amounts of money are spent per capita, prescription drug costs have risen, and in many cases private insurance is out of reach. Collectivists blame these problems on the free market and profit motive, but the truth is that they are all the result of government meddling with economies.

For example, the reason drug prices are so high is that foreign governments (like those of the UK and Canada) use their bulk buying power to purchase at such exceedingly low rates that in the U.S. prices must be raised significantly in order to engage in R&D and still recoup a profit.

The case is much the same for insurance. The government drastically drives up the cost of insurance by continually mandating that certain procedures be covered. This increases premiums and makes it harder for individuals to afford healthcare. And that’s on top of the fact that government programs like Medicare and Medicaid lead to people opting out of private insurance in favor of government programs, raising insurance premiums still higher.

Finally, hospital costs are also rising due to the EMTALA, a government mandate that mandates hospitals must treat individuals even if they cannot pay, forcing costs up for patients who do – costs passed on to the insurance companies.

Every single one of these problems was created by government regulation – not the free market. So why on earth would it make sense to fix them with more socialized medicine instead of less?