George Rebane

Union columnist Terry McLaughlin writes an excellent expose of nationalized healthcare in the newspaper’s 6jul17 edition – ‘Government run healthcare wouldn’t be cheaper; more efficient’.  In there she includes a detailed report from New Zealand, one of the countries often cited by socialists of how a healthcare system should work.  As you might expect, the revelation isn’t a pretty picture, but it is one of which RR readers are very familiar.

The bottom line of all this push toward a (horribly misnamed) “single payer system” (SSS) is that, for all the reasons known to thinking people everywhere, no country has a laudable and/or sustainable government run healthcare system.  All of them are ragged bureaucracies, delivering already bad services for a very high price.  And all of them are looking for ways to deliver even less at a higher cost in ways that are difficult to discover while you’re healthy, and that immediately obvious but too late to fix once you become a victim (aka ‘patient’).

I recommend Ms McLaughlin’s review of why we should do everything possible to avoid a SSS, and at the same time open up the delivery of healthcare products and services to the widest array of competent suppliers.  To argue that our pre-Ocare system already did that demonstrates a gross ignorance of our national economy, existing healthcare systems, and current affairs.

Finally, let’s dwell for a moment on the almost hysterical push for SSS we hear in the lamestream and in the exhortations of leftwing politicians, to remind us again of the seminal differences between people devoted to all things collectivist, and those who promote freedom, entrepreneurship, and market-driven solutions.

When in a social setting, peel back the daisy talking veneer of a collectivist, and you are instantly flooded with a monologue detailing the evils of selfish individualism and greedy capitalism, the remedies for which are government, and yet more government.  By definition, the collectivist sees a fulfilled human as one drawing all things good from being a compliant member of a politically legitimized collective.  By himself, the individual is nothing but a suffering derelict cast adrift on a sea of socially destructive competition that worships raw merit which inevitably gives rise to inequality and injustice.  It is the establishment, expansion, and submission to a comprehensive collective which gives rise to a society that provides succor to all of our ‘legitimate needs’ through a correct redistribution from those who can and must, to those who can’t or won’t – “From each according to his ability, to each …” (Marx, et al).  Examples of such collectives still abound.  

[update]  For those true believers in government healthcare, we draw examples of ‘healthcare from hell’ right here in the good ol’ USofA.  Everyone by now has heard, save perhaps the devotees of the lamestream media, of what the Veterans’ Administration has done in caring for the health of our veterans.  To this we can add the atrocity that is the system of, yes, federal hospitals charged with providing healthcare to Native Americans (pc for American Indians).  To get a snootful of what we can expect from SSS, and others around the world are already getting, you can read ‘‘People Are Dying Here’: Federal Hospitals Are Failing Native Americans’ in which we find that – In some of the nation’s poorest places, the government health service charged with treating Native Americans failed to meet minimum U.S. standards for medical facilities, turned away gravely ill patients and caused unnecessary deaths, according to federal regulators, agency documents and interviews. … The IHS, a unit of the Department of Health and Human Services, operates a network of hospitals and clinics, much like the Veterans Health Administration. Under U.S. treaties that date back generations, the service is legally responsible for providing medical care to about 2.2 million tribal members.

[8jul17 update]  I couldn’t figure out where to post the tragic story of little Charlie Gard – the lamestream had no problem with just judiciously ignoring it – whether it is an example of hellish healthcare or of yellow (aka progressive) journalism.  Charlie suffers from a rare genetic disorder that gives him a very small chance of surviving, and that small chance is being reduced to zero by the National Healthcare System of the British government whose death panel has ruled that the state 1) will not let Charlie’s parents, at no cost to the UK government, take Charlie to the US for treatment, 2) deemed Charlie’s case too expensive to treat under their NHS ‘single payer’ system (which is financially on its ass), and 3) have taken Charlie away from his parents and made him a ward of the state whose life will be officially terminated (they will ‘pull the plug’) so that “he can die with dignity” and fulfill his state determined “duty to die”.  UK’s socialist controllers cannot afford the precedent of returning the decision for an ailing person’s fate to his family.  Our progressives are purposely blind to these goings on, but the rest of us should pay close attention to how this plays out so that we can correctly evaluate the Left’s Single Payer Über Alles that is coming down the pike. (more here)  For a wider and deeper understanding of what’s in store for us, explore the widespread advent of state promoted ‘duty to die’ euthanasia across Europe.  I suppose ordering your premature death is probably the most direct way for governments to reduce the extent and cost of services of their socialized healthcare systems.