Posted on 02/26/2008 6:50:35 PM PST by jazusamo
People on the left often use other countries as examples of things that we should do. If other countries have a government-run medical system, then we should have one too, they say. If other countries control prices, then we should control prices — or so the reasoning goes.
Almost never is there any suggestion that we should first find out whether the actual results of the policies we are supposed to imitate are better or worse than what we already have.
There is in fact a lot that we can learn from other countries if we look at the actual consequences of some of the things we are being urged to do, instead of just assuming that we should automatically imitate what others are doing.
Studies have already shown that the waiting time before being able to get surgery is several times as long in a number of countries with government-run medical systems as in the United States. Modern medical technology like MRIs and CAT scans are also rarer in such countries.
Venezuela is currently giving us a lesson on the consequences of price controls. The government of leftist President Hugo Chavez has imposed price controls — and seems to be surprised that lower prices have lead to reduced supplies, even though price controls have led to reduced supplies in countries around the world and for thousands of years...
(Excerpt) Read more at jewishworldreview.com ...
PING
According to leftist logic, because other countries are impoverished, so should we. Perhaps that's why the left's solution to practically everything involves raising taxes and creating new regulations.
” People on the left often use other countries as examples of things that we should do.”
If Fidel isn’t dead already he would be if he hadn’t flown in doctors, no doubt in my mind.
bump
Mr. Sowell suggests that the costs of medical care cannot be reduce through law. I do think that assumes that there’s on monopolistic collusion taking place amongst insurance companies. Also, tort reform might have a significant cost-reduction effect on medical care.
No doubt in my mind. My brother-in-law is a retired surgeon. He retired about ten years earlier than he wanted to because of malpractice insurance and he never had any claims against him.
Than was about twenty years ago, I can't imagine what it's like now but that's a big factor in what we pay for medical care.
Some MD’s pay $300,000 to $500,000 per year with no claims ?
Just the fear of a John Edward’s type lawyer filing a frivolous lawsuit...
Tort reform would be one of the biggest single helps to control health care costs ?
Medicine is a govt protected near-monoply. It has amazing powers for a private sector enterprise. The govt helps it attack threats to its income stream and does nothing to curb it’s profit-before-health trade union, the AMA. The FDA is basically a running dog agency and it’s first mandate is to protect the profitability of the medical industry. It has a revolving door just like the DOD and is rife with corruption.
Like any monopoly medical costs will rise until they consume everything possible. Nationalize it and costs will skyrocket and service will plummet because there will be no recourse from incompetent and sadistic doctors at all.
As PJ O’Rourke said, “If you think health care is expensive now just wail until it’s free.”
Diocletian bump
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Agreed! We must do everything we can to stop the Rats from nationalizing medicine. Dr. Sowell is right on, Canada and the UK are excellent examples of why not to do it.
Ah but I remember the case of one of the tort reform pioneers in the Midwest. He helped put a hard cap on what might be awarded by jury and when he suffered (eventually died early from it) terribly at the hands of incompetence, he didn’t even get enough to cover all his costs and compensate him for the horrific reduction in the quality of his life (and length.)
It’s easy to buy into the claim that it’s lawsuits that have jacked up our medical costs, when really it’s mostly the distortions of government-mandated regulations and intervention in that sector. Along with things like insurance being ‘expected’ and tied into employment.
Thanks for the link, old Hugo is a real nut case.
The actual costs should be covered even into an unknown future. The MD, the hospital, the Insurance Companies, etc. should not be capped on actual.
It is the punitive money awards that sometimes seem excessive.
The professional cover-up by Medical Boards of bad MD’s is another big problem. Having a repeated offender loose is terrible.
We always talk to the RN’s, Dentists, EMT’s, OR tech’s...before medical staff decisions are made. The medical community knows who is good, bad, terrible...and why ( drugs, etc. )
Lefties believe an impoverished America is easier to bring under totalitarian control.
When politicians today say that they are going to "bring down the cost of medical care" or make housing "affordable," what are they talking about other than price controls?
. . . What is remarkable is how little interest there is among the media and among the public in how often and how consistently this has happened in the wake of price controls.
IMHO economics is a lot simpler if you think of ownership - of dollars or anything else - as "credit for doing something." Maybe you got that credit from your father for being born, or maybe you got it as a storeowner for giving someone a widget he wanted, or maybe you gave the storeowner a widget you made, or maybe you helped a businessman make the widget . . .If the government "controls a price," what it actually does is to arbitrarily limit your ability to give the supplier credit for the item or service he supplies. And that means that your judgement as to the value of supply, of the quality you want and when you want it, is censored.
Naturally, nobody will satisfy your desire for an item, on you schedule and of your desired quality, if you cannot tell them what your desire is.
It won't work when America socializes medicine. New drugs are developed only because America has companies that can make a profit developing them or foreign companies can make a profit selling them in America. Socialized medicine in America ends that. And government will not spend the money to do the research because most of it will go down the drain as most new drugs fail and the ones that succeed must lose money because the government prices will not make up the expense of the research for that drug much less pay for all the research for drugs that fail.
No new research means that as the effectiveness of antibiotics due to bacterial and viral mutation declines there will be no replacement by new antibiotics. The treatment of disease will regress toward the 1800s.
Machines will not be replaced as they wear out because they are very expensive and socialized medicine cannot justify the expense against other government expenses like Social Security and Defense and Farm Subsidies.
Socialized medicine in America is a LOSER for even the elite who think they are insulated. For them it will just take a little longer until they, tơo are dying from what we now think of as simple easily cured infections.
Odd how the MSM didn't make a big deal of this... wonder why?
Oops. That's "wait until it's free."
Either version has its merits ... :^)
Outstanding article/thread BUMP! Hooray Thomas Sowell! Thanks to every contributor to this thread.
Just what are you including in 'Medicine'? The insurance company and the doctors and the hospitals?
The few general practitioners I know are certainly not making monopoly profits.
Hospitals are closing in my state because they can't afford the government required charity care.
Insurance companies aren't a monopoly, you don't need to buy insurance, and you have a choice when you do. The fact that the government has taken to designing the policies isn't a problem of the insurance companies, but of the politicians.
A lot of trouble is caused by government intervention in the market for medicine, but that doesn't automatically make it a 'monopoly' situation.
The only real 'monopoly' I can think of in the medical industry is the limited length monopoly granted for patented drugs, and that's a reasonable way to pay off the needed research. And the patent system has been in place since the founding of our Republic, so you can't blame it for today's troubles.
Maybe you meant 'Medicine is now a mess, (by design of the government)'. This is a necessary step for government takeover. First, a Marxist would totally screw up the system, and blame it on 'monopoly', which suggests the free market failed. Then a Marxist would give the solution, which is a full government monopoly to replaced the failed 'capitalist' monopoly. However, they would never use the term 'monopoly' when referring to the government program and it's failures.
Medicine is a limited monopoly system. Only doctors are allowed to perform certain procedures, and the supply of of the performers is artificially low due to government license restrictions. With an artificially low supply, prices are are artificially high.
Returning to a freer enterprise system would lower the cost of medicine.
Good points all. I guess I’ve always thought of it in terms of supply and demand.
The demand will be there if the people can afford the product but the product will dry up if the government fixes the price lower than it can be produced.
I guess that might be an over simplification but it seems to me that price fixing has always been a disaster when it’s been implemented.
>> Now if only the media and the public had some interest in learning the economic lesson!
Facts are unimportant to the left and the uninformed because facts and truth are obstacles to their desires. Sowell knows this and his frustration expressed in the final line of his article should represent the turning of our rhetoric; to descend further into this perturbation will do little for our state of mind and liberty.
Thomas Sowell is a gentleman and I’d never expect him to advise America’s deconstructionists to go #$%^ themselves.
Well said and so true. There are many times he would be justified in really slamming someone or a group but he always does it in a gentlemanly manner.
Liberals will tell you that price controls haven’t worked because the correct people weren’t doing them. Enlightened Liberals of today would do price controls the correct way, and all will be swell. Really.
For the life of me, I just don't understand why in a debate, a true conservative doesn't just say, "The liberal candidate just wants you to suffer." It has been proven that socialized medicine increases wait times for services, and decreases needed diagnostic equipment." So either the candidate is ignorant of this, in which case, they should stop talking about a subject they know nothing about, or they are willfully deceiving you."
What is it that keeps conservative political candidates from using what is obviously a winning argument against socialized medicine?
I agree with you that it’s a great platform for conservatives and don’t understand why they don’t take advantage of it.
Machines will not be replaced as they wear out because they are very expensive and socialized medicine cannot justify the expense
Socialism is simply second guessing. After the fact the results of research are "obvious." Because all problems are simple after they have been solved. But when the socialist applies the "lesson" he derives from the second guess, that lesson is always that problems which the socialist doesn't have to solve are easy. And therefore the effort to solve the problem was wasteful, and price controls would have saved a lot of money.In reality, as you note, problems which the socialist doesn't consider at all when setting up his (her) bureacracy will come up and will be devastating because the simple and powerful, but readily demagogued, mechanism of "wasteful" competition has been suppressed, along with the mechanism by which increased demand evokes increased supply.
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