Via Betsy’s Page, the WSJ provides yet another illustration of how unworkable universal health care is in the real world. This time, the implosion happened in Illinois:
Universal government health care has once again returned as a political cause, with many Democrats believing it’s the key to White House victory in 2008. They might want to study last week’s news from Illinois, where Democratic Governor Rod Blagojevich’s tax increase to finance health care became the political rout of the year.
And it wasn’t those mean-spirited Republicans who delivered the drubbing. The Democrat-controlled legislature carpet bombed the governor’s tax increase in a 107 to 0 vote. Why? Because the Illinois legislators understood that a big tax on business would be an unmitigated disaster for their state:
As tax increases go, this was one of the worst. A “gross receipts tax” is popular with politicians because it applies to every dollar of company revenue … But this means the tax tends to hit hardest those small and medium-sized businesses that have healthy sales volumes but narrow profit margins.
In other words, the governor was trying to pay for “universal” health care by killing a big part of the state’s economy. This is a wake-up call for all of the people clamoring for various types of socialized medicine. Free health care is damned expensive, and someone has to pay for it.
Comments 2
I’m not surprised that a single state trying to pay for universal health care would find itself at a disadvantage. That doesn’t mean if you distribute the cost more fairly - across the entire nation - that it won’t be a worth while investment.
As a nation, we pay more per capita for health care and have worse health statistics than most of the developed world. Something is certainly wrong with our current system we’re not getting our money’s worth.
Posted 14 May 2007 at 12:32 pm ¶It would be immeasurably worse if attempted at the federal level. This type of “reform” has been incredibly expensive wherever it has been tried. Extended over 300 million people, it would be a disaster.
I agree that the system needs reform, but I would go in the opposite direction (i.e. deregulation, reallignment of tax incentives, free-market innovation, etc.). More government isn’t the answer.
Posted 14 May 2007 at 1:04 pm ¶Post a Comment