It's been a little while since the 2016 presidential election here in the US where Bernie Sanders stormed the front pages of the news. Naturally, the clamoring for free everything has died down a bit, but I'm still running into socialists demanding that the state provide free healthcare, among other things, to all people.
I'm from Romania. I was born in 1987 but I was too young to remember the horrors of socialism leading up to the December Revolution in 1989. However, my parents were not. Both born in the mid-1960's, they were able to witness the failure of socialism firsthand, and one of those failures was in healthcare. Now, I can already hear the chorus of voices screaming "That wasn't real socialism," but bear with me. That was just to illustrate my personal experience and first-hand accounts of such a scheme.
If you can be certain of one thing, it's that the government is terrible at providing services or goods of quality or with any kind of efficiency. The Guardian wrote about the inefficiencies of the National Health Service, with multiple doctors citing lack of funds for sometimes emergency medical treatment because of mismanagement of care and funds resulting in a cash shortage. This should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention. Central planning, as Mises famously wrote, consists of nothing more than letting "the government alone choose and enforce its rulings by the apparatus of coercion and compulsion." What happens when bureaucrats, armed with nothing more than their individual, incomplete understanding of what works and what doesn't, are the ones making choices for you? Your choices are necessarily limited by their imagination, and they'll use violence to keep you in the bounds of those choices.
Unfortunately, when it comes to centrally planning any market, that means that goods and services are going to be lower quality and cost more. Contrary to the cries of socialists the world around for more nationalization of industries, socialist markets and economies do not operate more efficiently or expand service. The calculation problem inherent in central planning - that an individual or small group of individuals will never have enough information to accurately make economic decisions for everyone in a given area - is especially evident in the provision of necessary services. Look no further than the Veterans' Administration here in the US. Shortages of care are common, and subpar medical care is the standard. Not sure about about you, but I have no interest on relying on the VA on a national scale.
This is to say nothing of the gross abrogation of private property and persons by the state through such a system. Charlie Gard's case is a vivid illustration of this. Rather than allowing his parents to take him back to the US for experimental treatment, the UK's NHS decided for them. According to his doctor's, the treatment that his parents were seeking wouldn't help (not sure how they made that assertion or why it was relevant, given Charlie's terminal status) and that their child should die in the hospital. As expected, the British Supreme Court upheld the decision of the state doctors. In this story about smokers and the obsese, the NHS is cutting funding for elective surgeries, such as knee and hip replacements. Rationing care is cited as the only way that the NHS can effectively manage its funds. Surprise surprise; centrally planned services aren't flexible enough to operate at net positive and incur a huge amount of waste.
I'm not heartless; my premiums for health insurance and for my daughter are astronomical. But the cause is not greed, or capitalism, or some other catchphrase that most people don't understand outside of a slogan. The problem is the government attempting to control and predict how health services and products can be most efficiently provided. Human innovation is a constant, and, if left to its own devices, human innovation will provide the best service, the highest quality products, for the lowest price to the most people.
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