Many advocates of “universal” health care tell us that the best way to fix American health care is to expand Medicare to cover everyone. They ignore the fact that the program is already fiscally unsustainable, even if its scope remains static. George Will explains why:
When Medicare was created in 1965, America’s median age was 28.4; now it is 36.6. The elderly are more numerous and medicine is more broadly competent than was then anticipated.
Meanwhile the number of people who pay the bills is shrinking in proportion to the number of people generating them:
In the 43 years since America decided that health care for the elderly would be paid for by people still working, the ratio of workers to seniors has steadily declined.
This has caused the geniuses who run the Medicare system to revert to price controls, the standard model that all government bureaucrats (everywhere) use for “cost containment”:
Medicare is a price-fixing system for upward of 12,000 procedures and drug codes — and for hundreds of categories of equipment.
This hasn’t worked, of course (price controls never work). Medicare is careening toward bankruptcy. Yet single-payer advocates claim government should have MORE control over the health system. And the apparatchiks are willing:
Governments with powerful political incentives to behave this way will play an increasingly large role in health care. As is said, if you think health care is expensive now, just wait until it is free.
Will stole that last line from P.J. O’Rourke, who coined it in a 1993 piece for Cato. But it still captures the magical thinking that surrounds the debate over government-run health care.
Many people think the government should provide free medical care because it is a “right.” The problem is that there is no such thing as “free” health care. Medicare demonstrates just how “not free” it is.
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Another problem is that commodities aren’t rights, and health care is a commodity no matter how much leftists wish it wasn’t. Real rights don’t come at the expense of taxpayers.
Posted 04 Jan 2009 at 3:03 am ¶Perhaps you’d care to explain why every other developed country covers everyone through national insurance systems at up to half the cost per head of what you’re already spending - and you can’t.
Posted 05 Jan 2009 at 12:18 pm ¶Marc, we don’t have to explain something that isn’t true.
Oh by the way, I just finished watching this video of an English nurse saying that Americans would be shocked at how terrible public hospitals in the UK are: http://www.biggovhealth.org/testimonials/patients/helen-evans/
Posted 05 Jan 2009 at 11:25 pm ¶First of all Paul, the cost per head, and who is covered, among countries is an absolute matter of record. Second, Helen Evans is not an ordinary nurse - she’s a far right director of something called Nurses for Reform, which argues for a complete return of the NHS to the private sector. She is not taken seriously by even mainstream right wingers, and in the US that would include Catron, who of course has said that anyone hoping to abolish Medicare is pretty much a wing-nut of the first order.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 9:01 am ¶Nurses for Reform is only far right if your idea of center is The Guardian.
Posted 06 Jan 2009 at 1:52 pm ¶“Matter of record” is Marc Brown’s mating call.
Posted 07 Jan 2009 at 9:02 am ¶Marc……… Could you please name one US government program that is BOTH effective AND efficient. Do you really want the government controlling your healthcare?
See this link on our neighbors to the North’s health care system:
http://americansforprosperity.org/shona-story
Posted 02 Jun 2009 at 9:50 pm ¶Post a Comment