Even for well-intentioned liberals, appearances are everything. The actual results don't matter.
Posted on 07/11/2018 7:32:35 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The U.K.’s government-run healthcare system, the National Health Service, turns 70 this month. There’s not much to celebrate.
The NHS is collapsing. Patients routinely face treatment delays, overcrowded hospitals, and doctor shortages. Even its most ardent defenders admit that the NHS is in crisis.
Yet American progressives want to import this disastrous model. About one in three Democratic senators and more than half of Democratic representatives support single-payer health care.
Why? The British experiment with socialized medicine has been a monumental failure. It would be foolish to repeat that mistake here.
Single-payer is fundamentally flawed. It relieves consumers of any obligation to pay for their care, at least directly. If the price of care is zero, then every patient can demand an infinite amount. The supply of care, meanwhile, is limited. And the amount of money the government can spend on health care is finite.
In a functional market, patients would demand care and providers would furnish it at mutually agreeable prices. If prices were too high, patients would demand less care, and marginal providers would exit the market. If prices were too low, patients would demand more care, and new providers would enter the market to supply it.
These basic market-clearing principles cannot operate in a single-payer system. Governments must forcibly cap demand at whatever level they’re willing to supply—that is, to pay for it.
The NHS experienced these problems from the start. In its first year, the service went well over its budget. Prime Minister Clement Attlee even begged citizens not to overuse health services. Staff shortages, caused in part by low pay, have plagued the system for decades. The NHS started recruiting doctors en masse from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in the 1960s to address the issue.
(Excerpt) Read more at fortune.com ...
Power, control, domination.......................
Bingo.
RATs are on their deathbed as well, IMO. They will stay there if the GOP find their gonads and spine.
The argument against this article, and a valid point although I come to a different conclusion, is that with today’s healthcare system, the payer (insurance/company) is not the user (individual) either so you still have a massively distorted system and we use 2x % of GDP on healthcare as Britain already even without a socialized boondogle. If you really want to see healthcare costs come down you need to enforce anti-trust laws, encourage removing healthcare as a perk for working (just like all other consumer products including other insurance), massively reform patent laws, and allow reimportation of drugs like we do in all other industries. That, and some other reforms like allowing pharmacists to prescribe basic medicines like Europe/Canada does, would reduce healthcare costs by probably ~70% over a couple year period and virtually everyone could then afford it, with charities taking up some slack like they used to do.
NHS:WE SHALL BECOME ALL—
Doctor: —POWERFUL! CRUSH THE LESSER RACES! CONQUER THE GALAXY! UNIMAGINABLE POWER! UNLIMITED RICE PUDDING! ETCETERA! ETCETERA.
They just didn’t do it the right way
All these fools have to do is look at the VA system and see what disaster looms for us if we expand single-payer nationally. Of course, they like to use the old commie canard “well, the VA does not practice single-payer the way it should”.
Yes it does, as a matter of fact. Waste, inefficiency, and rationing are natural byproducts of centrally running a large-scale healthcare system.
Even for well-intentioned liberals, appearances are everything. The actual results don't matter.
——Yet American progressives want to import this disastrous model.——
This thought points to the intellectual vacuum that is the American Left. There are no American leftists thinkers, no true intellectuals, no conceptualists.
The American Left goes to Europe and the UK and thinks wow! We could have that. Let’s have that. Let’s do it at home.
Let’s is the full extent of the thinking
The. Left. Wants. Us. Dead.
But THIS TIME socialism will work!
For the low-level useless idiots: FREE STUFF!
For the politicians: the power and money that comes with absolute control over 1/7th of the economy.
It’s that simple.
Gold Star post of the day !
That is precisely the mental deficiency that has plagued humanity for over one hundred years now. “Those other guys just got it wrong. WE will do it right!”
The proverbial definition of insanity.
Control. Forcing productive people to pay for indolent slackers.
Control over your body.
You are missing 2 critical points. The U.S. has the highest paid medical workers in the world. Our hospitals are not protected by tort lawsuits which drive up cost by 10%.
Yup
1) Wages in the medical sector would come down if you followed what I laid out 2) Tort cost is 10% in total - a lot of which is real and not excessive. With 350k deaths caused by medical error every year (not even counting other, less permanent errors), it probably should be pretty close to 10% of the costs. Getting rid of monopolies in healthcare and providing more options would force hospitals to provide better outcomes. (that said, I’m fine with tort reform)
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