The failure of single payer government health plans
Link here. Read it and be warned. Many Democrats, faced with the complete disaster of Obamacare, like to claim that none of those problems would have happened if they had instead imposed a single payer plan (a euphemism for nationalizing healthcare under a government run system).
Well, read the article at the link. It will give you an idea what to expect under nationalized healthcare, and it ain’t good.
An aside: I despise the term “single payer,” as it attempts to hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than the nationalization of healthcare, which puts the government in control. No journalist should use it, and if they do, they should either make it clear what it means, or they reveal themselves to be leftwing hacks.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
Link here. Read it and be warned. Many Democrats, faced with the complete disaster of Obamacare, like to claim that none of those problems would have happened if they had instead imposed a single payer plan (a euphemism for nationalizing healthcare under a government run system).
Well, read the article at the link. It will give you an idea what to expect under nationalized healthcare, and it ain’t good.
An aside: I despise the term “single payer,” as it attempts to hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than the nationalization of healthcare, which puts the government in control. No journalist should use it, and if they do, they should either make it clear what it means, or they reveal themselves to be leftwing hacks.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
That was mistitled. It is only *some* of the many failures of single payer healthcare (or lack of care).
The advantage of using Britain’s and Canada’s healthcare fiascoes as examples is that it demonstrates how socialism fails in capitalist countries (it fails everywhere, but it is especially stark when it occurs in the well-run system of free market capitalism).
In both Britain and Canada, the populaces have been moving back toward the free-market capitalist version of healthcare, because it works. The following 20-minute video shows how bad it is in Canada:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2jijuj1ysw
(Don’t try this at home – er – in your country.)
As was shown, a patient may have to wait so long for the treatment of one leg, that not only does she lose the then-ailing limb, she loses the other one, too. What a cluster.
Britain’s dental care is literally a joke. For decades, the Brits have joked about having bad teeth. I also understand that a recent Bureaucratic Stupidity – rationing the number of ambulances that can arrive at the ER in any given period of time (to save money) – has resulted in ambulances literally waiting outside the hospital grounds until the beginning of next rationing period. Not only do the patients receive delayed care, but the ambulances are not available for other urgent emergencies. That is not good service, and it is terrible care.
Socialism has never worked. Not in economic systems, and not in healthcare systems. Despite what some may tell you (that somehow in America it will be different, or that it will be done right, this time), it does not work in America, either – and we know this from experience. Not only has every nationalized industry in this country end up with increased problems (GM and Chrysler both went bankrupt after Obama took them over in 2009, the banks created the Great Recession of 2008 when the government told them how to run their businesses, and the Obamacare fiasco keeps growing by the month), but we even had a real life socialist experiment here.
When the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth Rock, their leader, William Bradford, had already signed everyone up for socialism – they signed a seven-year contract to that affect. However, as could have been predicted, when everyone’s labors are collected by the government and redistributed equally to the loafers and the productive alike, the able bodied seem to become loafers, resulting in shortages, scarcity, poverty (rather than prosperity), and lousy living (or healthcare) conditions.
http://www.libertyunderfire.org/2011/11/1430/
“I despise the term “single payer,” as it attempts to hide the fact that the proposal is nothing more than the nationalization of healthcare, which puts the government in control. ”
Use the proper technical term. That is “monopsony”. It is the inverse of monopoly, a single supplier/ It is a single buyer. It has just as many places or more for agency costs to develop as does monopoly, with the added problem that government can put in jail anyone who tries to go outside the monopsony.
In high school, I had a history teacher who played a game with us with quite the lesson about monopsonies (BTW: he didn’t teach us that word). The class was divided into four hypothetical railroads servicing the teacher’s hypothetical mine (there was a maximum price we could charge, as the mine could fall back on using a mule team to get its goods to market). My class was not able to organize into a cartel, but my team caught on, and as we were about to become insolvent, we demanded a lot from the mine in order to stay in business and let him keep the screws on the other three (he let us go belly up, as we demanded too much – more than the mule team – and it was the last turn of the game anyway). A hypothetical company in another class declared that they had kidnapped the teacher’s hypothetical family in order to extort a better contract (talk about cutthroat competition!).
The lesson was that you didn’t want to be a medical device supplier (or any other type) to a single-payer healthcare program.
Of course, the lesson of monopolies (e.g. Britain’s National Health Service and Canada’s Health Network) is that you don’t want to be a patient in a monopolistic health industry.
(So, how does such a monopoly wind up being so badly run that it appeals to the American Red Cross for help? Really. How incompetent is that? The customer base is absolutely captive, and the monopoly has the power of the government’s taxing ability to stay solvent. Only a government could so thoroughly screw up a monopoly, and we know, because they continually do so.)