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 […]
As I have pointed out before, the monolithic support of “progressives” for socialized medicine has less to do with its economic or medical viability than with their need to feel morally superior to the hoi polloi. However, as Megan McArdle points out, the morality of government-run health care is open to considerable question:
A gigantic single-payer […]
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Posted 23 August 2007
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As I have pointed out before, government price controls always produce shortages, no matter what industry is involved. In health care, arbitrary limitations on what doctors and hospitals can charge will always produce provider shortages.
This is not speculation. Many American hospitals have already closed as a result of Medicare and Medicaid “cost control” measures, and […]
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Posted 06 August 2007
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Kevin, MD links to an article describing the only true single-payer health care system that we have in the United States: the Indian Health Service. And the picture painted by Bernadine Healy is bleak:
The Indian Health Service is everyone’s worst nightmare of what government healthcare would look like. The system is riddled with crumbling facilities, […]
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Posted 12 July 2007
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Peter Barry Chowka has produced a mordant follow up to his prevous review of Michael Moore’s schlockumentary. Here’e a taste:
Michael Moore has described his new film Sicko as a “comedy,” but there’s nothing funny about it. With its radical prescription for the takeover of all of American health care by the federal government, it’s more […]
The Evening Standard reports on yet another egregious failure of Great Britain’s system of socialized medicine.
A mother has been forced to sell her home to pay for private treatment with a cancer “wonder drug” after funding for it was denied. Debbie Mitchell, 39, said she was “left to sit in the corner and die” […]
No matter how much evidence piles up showing that big government social programs are wasteful, inefficient, and costly, the “progressive community” is unable to extricate itself from its long-standing love affair with statism. Thus, imposing socialized medicine on the American public is its highest domestic priority.
CNS reports that this subject is on the minds and […]
The next time some “progressive” tells you that Canadian health care is superior to the U.S. system, ask him the following question: If their system is so great, why do the political leaders of that country eschew it for private care? The Montreal Gazette reports the following:
Former prime ministers Paul Martin, Jean Chretien and Joe […]
Stuart Browning at On the Fence Films has posted a new video, The Lemon, that outs single-payer as an outmoded idea that deserves to go on the ash-heap of history along with the Soviet bloc. It would be nice if the advocates of government-run health care would watch it and actually think about it. Fat chance.
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Posted 13 June 2007
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