Single-payer advocates cite recent wait time increases in U.S. emergency rooms as yet another reason to embrace government-run health care. Like most of their arguments, this one ignores some very inconvenient facts. It does not explain, for example, why Britain and Canada have serious wait time issues despite their government-controlled systems.
The reality, of course, is that countries with socialized medicine tend to have […]
Many single-payer advocates got the vapors when Rudy Giuliani quipped, ”If we ever got Hillarycare in this country, Canadians will have nowhere to go for health care.” Well, this Globe & Mail article suggests he was on to something:
More than 150 critically ill Canadians – many with life-threatening cerebral hemorrhages – have been rushed to the United States […]
Some unscrupulous advocacy groups and politicians have sought to exploit the tragedy of Nataline Sarkisyan for purposes of promoting single-payer health care. However, as Scott Gottlieb points out in this WSJ article, countries with government-run health systems don’t do as well as the U.S. in the area of transplants:
On balance, data suggests that in the U.S. transplant patients do quite […]
Graham seems really excited about this load of BS from AP/Yahoo, so I hate to rain on his parade. But duty compels me to do so. The poll purports to show that only 34% the public want a private sector health care system and 65% support a “universal” government-run alternative. In reality, it shows nothing of the kind.
For this or any […]
An important article of faith among single-payer advocates is the notion that the free market doesn’t work for health care because of a phenomenon known as information asymmetry. A typical expression of this precept can be found in Maggie Mahar’s response to a comment I recently made on her blog:
The health care market is different from other markets because […]
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Posted 15 December 2007
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After linking to this article outlining the manifold failures of the IHS, Kevin Pho directs the following question to the advocates of government-run health care:
How do you explain the miserable failure of the single-payer funded Indian Health Service? And before you explain that it is underfunded, why do you have such blind faith that the government will appropriately fund a national […]
Not satisfied with promulgating pseudo-scientific BS about global climate change, Al Gore is now bloviating about health care. Kevin,MD expresses considerable disappointment with the former veep’s position, at the center of which is the idiotic notion that health care is a “right”:
I strongly support universal, single payer, government-provided or government-funded health care … I think […]
In response to this post, in which I mentioned how touchy “single-payer advocates are about the “S” word, I received a comment from C.M. Hughes reciting the de rigueur “progressive” talking point about socialized medicine:
The reason we don’t like equating single payer with a socialized system is because they AREN’T EQUAL! Socialized systems, like England’s, […]
Advocates of “single-payer” health care become very touchy when it is equated with socialized medicine. And this is understandable. They wish to depict government-run health care in a positive light, and socialized medicine has a well-deserved reputation for inefficiency and poor care.
But is there any real difference, in practice, between these two types of government-run systems? […]
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Posted 06 October 2007
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Canada, we are constantly being told by single-payer advocates, is a model social democracy with a medical delivery system that we should envy. Oddly, the people who make such claims never want to answer a question that Bill Steigerwald reiterates in a recent column:
If Canada’s national health care system is so dang wonderful, why are so many Canadians […]
