Post modern shibboleths. ‘We care, we are compassionate, we are community’. Marxist tribal mantras find their epitome in fossilized socialized medicine. No competition, no privatization, no accountability. These tearful post modern societal Marxisms apparently animate the actions of the self-proclaimed civilized and moral. Sadly for socialist reductionists there is little that is moral or civilized in killing 20.000 people per annum in a small country of 30 million people.
In reality the ‘people’s health care system’ does not care much about people’s health. As with any socialized government construct, the people’s health care system is just another tool of centralization; another rhetorical plank in the ‘we really love you’ campaign platform; and just another abysmal waste of tax money. The usual objection ‘well in America you rot on the streets if you are ill!’ is the chattering of the insane and misinformed. The US health system is not a free market system. It suffers from governmental control and associated paralysis. One can only dream of a state where the citizens and their politicians were intelligent and mature enough to let the market inform medical practice.
So how bad is socialized medicine?
As measured by death rates social health care in Canada, kills in any one year about the same number of people as terrorists do in Baghdad. Time to pull out [of social health care]? The media so addicted to bad news [global cooling; global warming; AIDS; SARS; West Nile, Blue Nile, East Nile, famines, asteroids etc. etc.] is selectively ignorant when it comes to ranting and raving about 20.000 odd dead in a modern country’s health system. Double standard? I guess rotting bodies in hospital corridors is not gripping enough news.
According to the Canadian Institute for Health Information about 23.000 people die each year from in-hospital problems, wrong diagnoses, waiting lists and problems contracted through disease transmittal or uncleanliness. Though most Canadians can recite the current number of dead American GIs in Iraq, replete with details on name, rank and serial number, not one in ten could tell a pollster how many dead Canadians fertilize grave plots on an annual basis thanks to Marxian medicine.
According to the Toronto Star, the Canadian Marxist medical system now claims more lives than those who die from breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents and HIV - combined. But you won’t see protestors in a religious frenzy in downtown Toronto waving placards screaming to pull out of Karl Marx’s nightmare medical system and demanding an end to socialist oppression or having people die in vain to support faceless, evil [government managed] corporations. There are no documentaries citing conspiracy theories linking government money, to medical supply firms, to medical technology firms, to contractors working for foreign interests a la Halliburton, Bush and Bin Laden. Nor will you see a gay old jamboree with Bill Gates and the Hollywood celebs warning us, [as they did over AIDS], that socialized medical death is an epidemic and all [heterosexuals] will die.
Nope.
Socialized medicine is famously corrupt and non-transparent. Few medical mistakes ever garner any public attention. Doctors and hospitals rarely disclose any errors for fear of malpractice lawsuits. Hospitals are now being forced [by some gutsy bureaucrats], to reveal their safety standards and records. According to the Toronto Star ‘of the almost 2.5 million annual hospital admissions studied in Canada in 2000, about 185,000 were associated with a hospital error and close to 70,000 were preventable, according to a 2004 study.’ The Canadian health system’s kill rate is two times the American rate.
This poor performance is protected by government fiat. If you are ill you can’t search for a doctor or a hospital’s ranking, rating, history, or whether they are qualified or experienced in any given area. You have no choice on access. You will likely have to wait. You will have no recourse to private service unless you want to fly to a practice in the US. Cleveland Ohio is now the number one city of destination for Canadians with hip problems. Some US cities are making a lot of money from Canadians fleeing Marx’s mad medical system proving that health care should be a profit and not a cost center.
The US system is however nearly as bad as the doleful Canadian model. In Canada 70% of all health spending is by government. In the US government spends 50% of the total, with much of the rest tightly controlled by public firms and regulations [about 1000 statutes per state]. Prices are regulated and the consumer has no power of portability [if you move, or leave a job you can’t take your insurance with you]. This of course limits competition. The hapless consumer is also at the mercy of insurance companies who regularly reject treatment, or try to extort more money for operations that should be covered. Legal costs and lawsuits are also passed on in the form of higher premiums to the unsuspecting consumer [as what occurs with car insurance rates]. In short the US consumer pays high fees; has no market power whatsoever; and is the slave to a US health care system which is a government managed mangled mess.
The only real benefit of the US system is the use of technology which accounts for about 25 % of total health care spend. But the differences between the US and Canadian models are ones of degree not of any real difference in attitudes, government interventionism or political opportunism.
The costs of socialized health care over the long term are of course unsustainable. As the population ages and the workforce shrinks the system will simply collapse. Taxes and debt will go up to pay for the non-transparent, badly managed and resource poor health system, but not by nearly enough to keep the system functioning. Health care is like any other market. If you close it off to competition and transparency obvious problems arise. You will have a supply issue [too few doctors and staff due to wage controls and not enough college and university graduates]; a demand issue [it is perceived as free so everyone uses it]; and a price point issue [since you don’t pay directly for what you use, the system can’t allocate resources to solve problems].
In order to solve health care issues you need to open the system up. Allow privatization alongside a publicly funded system. Within the publicly funded system send each taxpayer each year a breakdown of what they paid in taxes to the system versus what they consumed. Allow competition to exist in the public system where the best doctors, the best hospitals and the clinics with the best business processes receive the most funding. Put doctor and hospital records and performance on the Web. In short open up the dismal world of Marxian mis-management to transparency.
Health care is not some magical fantasy world. Like eye-care, hair-care, car-care, shoe-care, or baby-care it is a market with variegated supply and demand considerations and literally millions of price points that cannot be centralized. It is immoral to kill thousands of people in a government mis-managed meat house. One would expect that the media, which is so preoccupied with bad news, would want to study this issue a little more closely.
Good links on the topic:
http://www.thestar.com/News/article/202287
http://heart.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/79/4/345
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/104/suppl_1/I-92
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/WalterEWilliams/2007/02/14/do_we_want_socialized_medicine
http://circ.ahajournals.org/cgi/content/full/104/suppl_1/I-92