Why Does the Left Want Universal Health Care? Britain’s Is on Its Deathbed

Fortune ^ | 07/11/2018 | Sally Pipes

[SeekAndFind]

The U.K.’s government-run healthcare system, the National Health Service, turns 70 this month. There’s not much to celebrate.

The NHS is collapsing. Patients routinely face treatment delays, overcrowded hospitals, and doctor shortages. Even its most ardent defenders admit that the NHS is in crisis.

Yet American progressives want to import this disastrous model. About one in three Democratic senators and more than half of Democratic representatives support single-payer health care.

Why? The British experiment with socialized medicine has been a monumental failure. It would be foolish to repeat that mistake here.

Single-payer is fundamentally flawed. It relieves consumers of any obligation to pay for their care, at least directly. If the price of care is zero, then every patient can demand an infinite amount. The supply of care, meanwhile, is limited. And the amount of money the government can spend on health care is finite.

In a functional market, patients would demand care and providers would furnish it at mutually agreeable prices. If prices were too high, patients would demand less care, and marginal providers would exit the market. If prices were too low, patients would demand more care, and new providers would enter the market to supply it.

These basic market-clearing principles cannot operate in a single-payer system. Governments must forcibly cap demand at whatever level they’re willing to supply—that is, to pay for it.

The NHS experienced these problems from the start. In its first year, the service went well over its budget. Prime Minister Clement Attlee even begged citizens not to overuse health services. Staff shortages, caused in part by low pay, have plagued the system for decades. The NHS started recruiting doctors en masse from India, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka in the 1960s to address the issue.

[bankwalker]

If someone else is paying for your medical expenses, then they have the authority to make you do healthy things and punish you for doing not so healthy things.<p

The lefties are control freaks.

[bankwalker]

If someone else is paying for your medical expenses, then they have the authority to make you do healthy things and punish you for doing not so healthy things.

The lefties are control freaks.

[ExTxMarine]

DING! DING! DING!
We have a winner!

This is no different than young millennials attending a dinner party at their bosses big, beautiful home and saying, “I want this kind of house.” Then being upset when their boss scolds them for being ten minutes late to work every day and leaving early every Friday!

You can’t just “want” that house, you must WORK HARD for that house! You have to make sacrifices for that house! You have to PLAN to make enough money for that house!

Seeing something and wanting it does’t mean it all works out the way you have it in your head!! UGH!

[A_perfect_lady]

If the price of care is zero, then every patient can demand an infinite amount. The supply of care, meanwhile, is limited. And the amount of money the government can spend on health care is finite.

There it is, in a nutshell. And I've seen first hand how people get when it comes to health care. My friend's mother in the last year of her life was constantly battling fevers, nausea, lightheadedness, chronic cough. She was Medi/Medi, so they faithfully hospitalized her every time she "didn't feel good" (she never felt good) and ran every test from rabies to lupus (only a slight exaggeration), kept her in Intensive Care, treated the symptoms, gave her 16 pills a day, never did figure out what was wrong with her other than Chronic Pulmonary issues, diabetes, depression, morbid obesity, restless leg syndrome, and a host of other ailments likely to plague a sedentary, overweight woman in her 70s.

They kept her alive as long as they possibly could. By the time she died, she'd cost taxpayers probably $2M. The last month alone was over $800K, her daughter told me.

They were liberals, so neither felt the slightest discomfort in the massive soaking they gave the system. It was OWED them. She cost the tax payer more than she ever earned in her lifetime, much less what she paid. And so much of it was lifestyle related.

[A_perfect_lady]

What a bizarre picture! Where did you find that??

[Verbosus]

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[Leaning Right]

> Where did you find that?? <

I did a Google image search for ‘Potemkin Village’. By the way, I’m quite certain that the image is a Photoshop. But it does make the point!

[Oldeconomybuyer]

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