Ignore for the moment that the Federal Government does not have Constitutional permission to engage in socialized medicine. Look only at results where it has been tried. Kevin tells us about how it’s working out in the U.K.
There are lots of other examples but the first implementation appears to have come from Germany and was a failure as well.
One of the basic problems with socialized medicine is who is spending who’s money. As pointed out by Milton and Rose Friedman in Free to Choose there are four different possibilities (from memory):
- One spends ones own money on themselves.
- One spends ones own money on someone else.
- One spends someone else’s money on themselves.
- One spends someone else’s money on someone else.
On average, the first case is going to result in the best return on any given dollar spent. The person will optimize the result for the available money.
On average, the last case is going to result in the worst return on any given dollar spent. The person has little incentive to limit the amount of money spent and to get a good result for the money spent.
Socialized medicine most closely matches the last case and results in the least efficient spending of money.
Tell all the Democrat candidates for President to shove their illegal plans where the sun doesn’t shine then save on their own health care by getting their colonoscopy for removal of the reams of paper done without sedation.
You got that exactly right. I wonder if there are enough voters who understand how things really work? I guess maybe we’ll see.
The only reason socialism has never worked is that the right people have never been in charge of it. We can take that as proof that we’re just not giving it a fair chance.
On a strikingly similar note, a friend once told me that his father, like so many before him, almost succeeded in building a perpetual motion machine. The fact that he had come so very close, as he judged it, inspired him to keep trying and trying and trying. The fact that it never worked merely indicated to our inventor that the right design had yet to be built and tested under the right conditions.
And since we’re on the subject of public education (you did know we were discussing the effects of public education, didn’t you?) some people are almost learning about human nature, economics, American history, and physics, which proves that we haven’t yet spent enough money on public education.