Just What The Doctor Ordered?
Have you been watching the news over the past day or so? Have you heard about the complaints being made against the Army medical system and the way it treats recovering GIs? Regardless of how you feel about our ongoing involvement in Iraq, if a guy gets himself blown to pieces in the service of a government, it's really only fair that that government should give him decent medical care afterwards. It seems, however, that our government doesn't maintain its hospitals any more efficiently than the INS secures the border or the Postal Service delivers the mail.
Keep this little fact in mind the next time you hear someone self-righteously demanding socialized medicine (a.k.a. "Universal Health Care"), because that's exactly what the VA Hospital system is. Without market forces and competition, the VA Hospital system is a "free", "equal", one-size-fits-all approach to health care. How do they keep drug prices down? They only buy a limited number of drugs to use and distribute. What happens if there's not enough room in the budget for things? Well, that's just too bad -- people do without.
It's neither surprising nor unheard of in other countries with socialized medicine. These issues are well documented in places like Canada, England and continental Europe. But the "Universal Health Care Now!" crowd doesn't mention this. They picked health care from their magical tree of endless "rights", and now it's just another freebie they use to buy votes.
But nothing is "free". Someone has to pay for it, even if it's not you. When the government nationalizes health care, that doesn't mean that there's suddenly an endless supply of funds to take care of every ache, pain, twinge, and hypochondriacal urge. In fact, without something to limit access, the demand for services will go up. Mark my words, there will be a budget of some sort for every nationalized health care facility, and if you've ever dealt with government bureaucracies, you know how they get when it comes to budgets. They get bloated with red tape and extra employees, then the funds get short, then we have to start cutting costs. Naturally, the logical place to cut costs is in the realm of services provided, because government employees are union members who vote for the politicians who dream up these bright ideas. The patient winds up just like the poor guys at Walter Reed: not necessarily dead, but not all that healthy either.
There's an old saying that "freedom isn't free". True enough. But freedom is ultimately a low-cost undertaking: create a limited system of government (like our Constitution laid out before the socialists started ignoring it) and basically leave people alone as long as they don't hurt anyone else. Once government starts doing more, the system gets to be more expensive. Quality, on the other hand, always seems to suffer.
At least that's what the soldiers who've been getting this "free" health care seem to be telling us.
Keep this little fact in mind the next time you hear someone self-righteously demanding socialized medicine (a.k.a. "Universal Health Care"), because that's exactly what the VA Hospital system is. Without market forces and competition, the VA Hospital system is a "free", "equal", one-size-fits-all approach to health care. How do they keep drug prices down? They only buy a limited number of drugs to use and distribute. What happens if there's not enough room in the budget for things? Well, that's just too bad -- people do without.
It's neither surprising nor unheard of in other countries with socialized medicine. These issues are well documented in places like Canada, England and continental Europe. But the "Universal Health Care Now!" crowd doesn't mention this. They picked health care from their magical tree of endless "rights", and now it's just another freebie they use to buy votes.
But nothing is "free". Someone has to pay for it, even if it's not you. When the government nationalizes health care, that doesn't mean that there's suddenly an endless supply of funds to take care of every ache, pain, twinge, and hypochondriacal urge. In fact, without something to limit access, the demand for services will go up. Mark my words, there will be a budget of some sort for every nationalized health care facility, and if you've ever dealt with government bureaucracies, you know how they get when it comes to budgets. They get bloated with red tape and extra employees, then the funds get short, then we have to start cutting costs. Naturally, the logical place to cut costs is in the realm of services provided, because government employees are union members who vote for the politicians who dream up these bright ideas. The patient winds up just like the poor guys at Walter Reed: not necessarily dead, but not all that healthy either.
There's an old saying that "freedom isn't free". True enough. But freedom is ultimately a low-cost undertaking: create a limited system of government (like our Constitution laid out before the socialists started ignoring it) and basically leave people alone as long as they don't hurt anyone else. Once government starts doing more, the system gets to be more expensive. Quality, on the other hand, always seems to suffer.
At least that's what the soldiers who've been getting this "free" health care seem to be telling us.
posted by DrJDG @ 23:03
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