Universal Health Care Part III

Those of us who are getting on in years can remember a time when most people had no health insurance, when we simply paid the doctors or the pharmacies and went on our way, without giving it a second thought. I have especially painful memories of having a hospital bill of $50 for the treatment of a baseball injury back in 1949.

You have no idea how big $50 was for me at that time. It was the most money that I had ever paid for anything. But the bill got paid off, a few dollars at a time, over a period of months.

When and why did health insurance, paid by third parties, become widespread in the American economy? Like so many things that the government does, third-party health insurance grew out of problems created by previous government policies.

During World War II, the government imposed wage and price controls. This meant that employers who wanted to hire more workers were forbidden to offer higher wages to attract them. So employers started offering various benefits instead. One of these benefits was employer-paid health insurance.

Since these benefits were not taxed as income, and could be treated as a business expense by the employer, everybody seemed to be better off. But, long after the war was over and wage and price controls were gone, the idea that third parties ought to pay for health insurance continued on. Eventually the government itself got into the business of providing health insurance and now some politicians depict it as a scandal that not everyone has health insurance paid for by third-parties.

This might make some sense if third-party insurance was cheaper or better than insurance that each individual pays for directly. All the evidence is that it is just the opposite. When third parties pay, use of the insurance -- and of the medical resources that it pays for -- has skyrocketed beyond anything contemplated at the outset.

China, Britain and other countries have been surprised to discover that the costs of government-provided health care greatly exceeded the costs initially projected. But they should not have been surprised. It is one of the oldest and simplest principles of economics that people demand more when they pay a lower price, especially when that price is zero.

There is no fixed amount of medical "need." There are some minor ailments that you may either ignore or treat with some over-the-counter medication, perhaps with the advice of a pharmacist. There are some other ailments that might cause you to phone your doctor for advice but which neither you nor he considers serious enough for an office visit. And of course there are other things that require immediate and perhaps extensive medical attention.

When you are paying your own money, you sort these things out accordingly. But when someone else is paying, then the trivial and the urgent are both likely to find their way to the doctor's office. This means that both are likely to get less time and that patients with serious problems are the biggest losers.

Countries with government-provided health care have been known for shorter office visits, whether in the Soviet Union, Canada, Japan or elsewhere.

As bureaucratic hassles multiply under third-party payments, being a doctor becomes a less attractive occupation for some, leading to such things as earlier retirement or fewer young people going into medicine. More than half the doctors in Britain, for example, were not trained in British medical schools, but have been imported from other countries, including Third World countries where the training may not be up to the standards of British medical schools.

These are just some of the real-world problems of third-party payments and government controls that are passed over in utter silence by those who are pushing for "universal health care." Lurking just beneath the surface is the old lure of something for nothing.

What about the poor when it comes to health care? If this were the real issue, then money could be provided to take care of the poor. But here, as elsewhere, the poor are being used as excuses to fasten a whole system of controls on all of us. The left uses the poor as political human shields.

I have had 2 children, and have had to pay the whole thing out of my own pocket both times, I made too much to get Medicaid, and didn't have insurance through a job. The problem with the outrageous costs of many things in this country can be blamed directly on the proliferation of lawsuits that were, both undeserved, and ridiculously over paid. Malpractice insurance costs are OUTRAGEOUS! I even had to have it while working as an X-Ray Tech after deep pockets laws were passed, some of my friends have been included in some suits aginst hospitals, simply because they were the one who did exams on the patient, and had nothing to do with the treatment. No one can afford to pay medical costs themselves anymore. I could go on, but I'll shut up

The problems with articles like this are they do not provide answers about how to pay for these expensive medical treatments.

People are living longer and longer, and it takes a lot of money to keep them alive. Who is going to pay for this?

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