Posted on 12/08/2009 8:22:42 AM PST by bs9021
Hopeless Change
Malcolm A. Kline, December 8, 2009
Always check the vintage of ideas that academic, political and media-elites label “new.” “In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal ‘cradle-to-grave’ healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine,” Yuri N. Maltsev writes in the Free Market newsletter published by the Ludwig von Mises Institute. “The ‘right to health’ became a ‘constitutional right’ of Soviet citizens.”
“The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would ‘reduce costs’ and eliminate the ‘waste’ that stemmed from ‘unnecessary duplication and parallelism’—i.e. competition.” Perhaps you could argue that that little experiment in “transforming health care” resulted in “fewer and better Russians.”
“In the depths of the socialist experiment, healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average U.S. level,” Maltsev recounts. “Moreover, the filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies added to an overall impression of hopelessness and frustration that paralyzed the system.”
“According to official Russian estimates, 78 percent of all AIDS victims in Russia contracted the virus through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood in the state-run hospitals.” Less primitive, more humane and modern versions of this system have not fared much better.
According to Sara Hudson of the Centre for Independent Studies in Australia, “In the last 15 years, Commonwealth funding for Indigenous specific health programs has increased by nearly 400% with no appreciable improvements in health outcomes.”...
(Excerpt) Read more at academia.org ...
It ain’t Hope and Change, it’s Hoax and Change.
Even better, Hoax and Chains
The United States of America will not revert to a Command economy!
The Great Depression was built on the tyranny of FDR’s New Deal ‘central planning economy’.
History does not repeat itself, but people repeat history.
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