This article is excerpted from Ray Harvey's book, Leave Us Alone.
There are approximately five thousand reasons not to nationalize healthcare, and every one of these reasons is unanswerable.
For instance, there's the irrefutable fact that nationalized healthcare is the absolute destroyer of new medical technologies.
There's the vast technological superiority of medicine in America, which, though a very young country, has long dominated the field of medicine, precisely because that field was once left free; and let us not forget also that the cost of medicine has increased each and every time this country has made a move toward socializing its healthcare system.
There's the recent study by David Green and Laura Casper called "Delay, Denial and Dilution," which was compiled for the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, and which concludes, in no uncertain terms, that England's socialized healthcare services are "nearly the worst in the developed world."
The head of the World Health Organization calculated that Britain has as many as 25,000 unnecessary cancer deaths a year because of under-provision of care. Twelve percent of specialists surveyed admitted refusing kidney dialysis to patients suffering from kidney failure because of limits on cash. Waiting lists for medical treatment have become so long that there are now "waiting lists" for the waiting list (Walter Williams, "Sweden's Government Health Care." March, 2009).
There's also the undeniable fact that nationalized healthcare drastically shrinks the pool of doctors from whom we may freely choose.
Let us not forget either that nationalized healthcare puts the science of medicine into the hands of political elites; therefore, nationalized healthcare creates an atrocity exhibition of leviathan-sized bureaus.
Consider too that under Canada's nationalized healthcare system, one must first be referred to a specialist, and the waiting list for something like a gynecological surgery is "4 to 12 weeks, cataract removal 12 to 18 weeks, tonsillectomy three to 36 weeks and neurosurgery five to 30 weeks. Also, Toronto-area hospitals, concerned about lawsuits, ask patients to sign a legal release accepting that while delays in treatment may jeopardize their health, they nevertheless hold the hospital blameless" (Ibid).
Which is exactly why the Canadian government spends, via heavy taxation, over $1 billion yearly for medical treatment here in the horrid old U. S. of A.
In addition, there's Sven Larson recent article "Lesson from Sweden's Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt," published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Spring 2008).
Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor's request was denied because the drug was 33 percent more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.
Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden's third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden's National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.
Dr. Olle Stendahl, a professor of medicine at Linkoping University, pointed out a side effect of government-run medicine: its impact on innovation. He said, "In our budget-government health care there is no room for curious, young physicians and other professionals to challenge established views. New knowledge is not attractive but typically considered a problem (that brings) increased costs and disturbances in today's slimmed-down health care."
And yet as indisputable as all these arguments are, there's a more fundamental reason not to nationalize healthcare, and that reason is this:
No person and no government has the right to the life and labor of any other person, including the life and labor of doctors.
Doctors, just like you and me, are individual human beings, and as such their lives do not belong to any governmental bureau.
Nor do their lives belong to other people.
Doctors are free to practice, or not.
They are free to treat, or not.
The work of doctors, like all work, is contractual.
Because they are doctors and because their work often concerns matters that are life-or-death does not mean that others suddenly own these people.
To say that anyone has the right to the life, labor, and expertise of doctors is the same as saying doctors are slaves to the rest of us. It is to say that doctors are slaves to the state who enforces such unjust laws.
Doctors are not slaves. You will destroy the noble profession of medicine the instant you say they are.
If you're appalled by the cost and quality of medicine in this country today, consider, please, the reason that medicine is so expensive now: healthcare in this country is already 50 percent socialized. You can see it does not work. Indeed, it cannot work, economically, politically, mathematically.
If America had an actual laissez-faire healthcare system, you'd witness greater quality medicine at lower prices, and you'd have many more expert doctors to choose from.
Quoting from an article in Forbes Magazine:
Prior to the government's entrance into the medical field, health care was regarded as a product to be traded voluntarily on a free market -no different from food, clothing, or any other important good or service. Medical providers competed to provide the best quality services at the lowest possible prices. Virtually all Americans could afford basic health care, while those few who could not were able to rely on abundant private charity.
Had this freedom been allowed to endure, Americans' rising productivity would have allowed them to buy better and better health care, just as, today, we buy better and more varied food and clothing than people did a century ago. There would be no crisis of affordability, as there isn't for food or clothing...
Today, what we have is not a system grounded in American individualism, but a collectivist system that aims to relieve the individual of the "burden" of paying for his own health care by coercively imposing its costs on his neighbors. For every dollar's worth of hospital care a patient consumes, that patient pays only about 3 cents out-of-pocket; the rest is paid by third-party coverage. And for the health care system as a whole, patients pay only about 14%.
The result of shifting the responsibility for health care costs away from the individuals who accrue them was an explosion in spending.
In a system in which someone else is footing the bill, consumers, encouraged to regard health care as a "right," demand medical services without having to consider their real price. When, through the 1970s and 1980s, this artificially inflated consumer demand sent expenditures soaring out of control, the government cracked down by enacting further coercive measures: price controls on medical services, cuts to medical benefits, and a crushing burden of regulations on every aspect of the health care system.
As each new intervention further distorted the health care market, driving up costs and lowering quality, belligerent voices demanded still further interventions to preserve the "right" to health care. And Republican politicians - not daring to challenge the notion of such a "right" - have, like Romney, Schwarzenegger and Bush, outdone even the Democrats in expanding government health care (Yaron Brook, Forbes Magazine, 2008).
Here is a very simple test that anyone can perform to demonstrate fully that healthcare is not a right:
Rights are immutable; they apply as much to humans now as they did to humans 5000 years ago.
If healthcare is a right, then, where was the right to a heart transplant seventy years ago, before such things as heart transplants ever existed?
Where is your right to be completely cured of cancer now?
Where is your right to healthcare if there are no doctors anywhere near you? Or if there aren't enough doctors because medical students stop studying medicine since it's no longer worthwhile, after all the effort, to live as an indentured servant?
Doctors go through an extraordinarily rigorous degree of training and education which most people have no conception of whatsoever. These women and men do it not because they're forced to but by choice. Neither you nor I nor any government bureau has a right to that work.
No person has the right to anyone else's life.
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