Health Care BS

Bad ideas are notoriously hard to kill. Nowhere is this perverse law of nature better illustrated than in the continued survival of socialized medicine as a perceived cure for the ills of American health care.

This profoundly bad idea has been repeatedly interred under tons of damning factual data only to rise again like one of those zombies from “The Night of the Living Dead.�

In his most recent column, Walter Williams throws a few shovels of dirt on this “undead� notion by highlighting the wait times and poor clinical outcomes associated with the British health care system:

A recent academic study showed National Health Service delays in bowel cancer treatment were so great that, in one in five cases, cancer which was curable at the time of diagnosis had become incurable by the time of treatment.

He also points out that the problems with our own health care system are almost all traceable to too much government regulation. Such rational arguments may be an exercise in futility, however.

When politicians as diverse in their perspectives as Hillary Clinton and Newt Gingrich agree on the need for “universal health care,� it begins to take on the grim inevitability of Greek tragedy.