America is definitely not a textbook example of private health.
One of the biggest myths out there is that American health system is an example of free markets gone wild, of capitalism and of privatisation. This lie is used as a throw away line by progressives and socialists who favor the expansion of the state, and the elimination of private business in the health sector.
And whilst they do not yet have "universal" coverage but they are 90% of the way there since SCHIPS and other reforms.
We know Britain, Canada and France are textbook examples of universal public health, and they totally suck. Health services are literally rationed out to millions. You wait months, or you die waiting, or you run off to America to pay for an operation. For decades, the civilised world has decided not to ration out food which is vital and essential to our well-being. Food stamps, queues and rationing are a thing of the Soviet era... If only rationing medicine was not !!
The Angry Economist nails it with one simple paragraph.
Our current health care mess was caused by wage and price controls during WWII. Wages were limited, so to attract the best employees, employers bought them free health care. After the war was over, employees took free health care for granted. Health care was still affordable then, because most people paid for it out of pocket. Now that very few people have to pay their own medical bills, they don't care how much health care costs, so they don't care to economize, and the medical industry is happy to oblige their spendthrift ways. Everybody complains about how the insurance companies don't want to pay for anything. If people were paying their own money, they wouldn't want to pay for anything, and the medical industry would find itself needing to keep the cost of health care low.
"Britain, Canada and France are textbook examples of universal public health, and they totally suck"
ReplyDeleteLOL - you USAnians are really quite incredibly ignorant of the world outside your country. All 3 of these countires spend a much smaller proportion of national output on health than the US, and all three have objectively better health outcomes, by almost any criterion you care to name - life span, Disability-Adjusted Life Years, infant mortality, etc. In fact on most of them even Cuba (!) does better than the US. Those cheese-eating surrender monkeys, BTW, are a poster child for the WHO with the most cost-effective health system (a careful blend of public and private) in the world.
However, you're quite right that a lot of the the problem in the US stems from health coverage being a perk of employment. But going to a pure free market system would be worse, for good economic reasons. Try googling terms like "adverse selection" and "supplier induced demand".
If you think a basket case economy like Cuba does better than the US, I'd like to see some reliable evidence. The WHO also use other dubious metrics to rank health systems including "equality of access". In that sense, North Korea and Cuba have the best equality of access of any system in the world.
ReplyDeleteHealth related spending in the US is out of control, which definitely lends support to the idea that the US needs to move to a user-pays system where there are price signals and mechanisms for providers to compete against each other and lower price.
I don't see the point in comparing medical spending in each country as some kind of justification for socialised medicine. What I do see is the simple irrefutable logic that government cannot wave its magic wand and bring costs down by controlling and regulating an industry.
A private enterprise and competitive agents acheive this result with much more success than government bureaucracies.