Posted on 02/26/2008 6:50:35 PM PST by jazusamo
It won't work when America socializes medicine. New drugs are developed only because America has companies that can make a profit developing them or foreign companies can make a profit selling them in America. Socialized medicine in America ends that. And government will not spend the money to do the research because most of it will go down the drain as most new drugs fail and the ones that succeed must lose money because the government prices will not make up the expense of the research for that drug much less pay for all the research for drugs that fail.
No new research means that as the effectiveness of antibiotics due to bacterial and viral mutation declines there will be no replacement by new antibiotics. The treatment of disease will regress toward the 1800s.
Machines will not be replaced as they wear out because they are very expensive and socialized medicine cannot justify the expense against other government expenses like Social Security and Defense and Farm Subsidies.
Socialized medicine in America is a LOSER for even the elite who think they are insulated. For them it will just take a little longer until they, tơo are dying from what we now think of as simple easily cured infections.
Odd how the MSM didn't make a big deal of this... wonder why?
Oops. That's "wait until it's free."
Either version has its merits ... :^)
Outstanding article/thread BUMP! Hooray Thomas Sowell! Thanks to every contributor to this thread.
Just what are you including in 'Medicine'? The insurance company and the doctors and the hospitals?
The few general practitioners I know are certainly not making monopoly profits.
Hospitals are closing in my state because they can't afford the government required charity care.
Insurance companies aren't a monopoly, you don't need to buy insurance, and you have a choice when you do. The fact that the government has taken to designing the policies isn't a problem of the insurance companies, but of the politicians.
A lot of trouble is caused by government intervention in the market for medicine, but that doesn't automatically make it a 'monopoly' situation.
The only real 'monopoly' I can think of in the medical industry is the limited length monopoly granted for patented drugs, and that's a reasonable way to pay off the needed research. And the patent system has been in place since the founding of our Republic, so you can't blame it for today's troubles.
Maybe you meant 'Medicine is now a mess, (by design of the government)'. This is a necessary step for government takeover. First, a Marxist would totally screw up the system, and blame it on 'monopoly', which suggests the free market failed. Then a Marxist would give the solution, which is a full government monopoly to replaced the failed 'capitalist' monopoly. However, they would never use the term 'monopoly' when referring to the government program and it's failures.
Medicine is a limited monopoly system. Only doctors are allowed to perform certain procedures, and the supply of of the performers is artificially low due to government license restrictions. With an artificially low supply, prices are are artificially high.
Returning to a freer enterprise system would lower the cost of medicine.
Good points all. I guess I’ve always thought of it in terms of supply and demand.
The demand will be there if the people can afford the product but the product will dry up if the government fixes the price lower than it can be produced.
I guess that might be an over simplification but it seems to me that price fixing has always been a disaster when it’s been implemented.
>> Now if only the media and the public had some interest in learning the economic lesson!
Facts are unimportant to the left and the uninformed because facts and truth are obstacles to their desires. Sowell knows this and his frustration expressed in the final line of his article should represent the turning of our rhetoric; to descend further into this perturbation will do little for our state of mind and liberty.
Thomas Sowell is a gentleman and I’d never expect him to advise America’s deconstructionists to go #$%^ themselves.
Well said and so true. There are many times he would be justified in really slamming someone or a group but he always does it in a gentlemanly manner.
Liberals will tell you that price controls haven’t worked because the correct people weren’t doing them. Enlightened Liberals of today would do price controls the correct way, and all will be swell. Really.
For the life of me, I just don't understand why in a debate, a true conservative doesn't just say, "The liberal candidate just wants you to suffer." It has been proven that socialized medicine increases wait times for services, and decreases needed diagnostic equipment." So either the candidate is ignorant of this, in which case, they should stop talking about a subject they know nothing about, or they are willfully deceiving you."
What is it that keeps conservative political candidates from using what is obviously a winning argument against socialized medicine?
I agree with you that it’s a great platform for conservatives and don’t understand why they don’t take advantage of it.
Machines will not be replaced as they wear out because they are very expensive and socialized medicine cannot justify the expense
Socialism is simply second guessing. After the fact the results of research are "obvious." Because all problems are simple after they have been solved. But when the socialist applies the "lesson" he derives from the second guess, that lesson is always that problems which the socialist doesn't have to solve are easy. And therefore the effort to solve the problem was wasteful, and price controls would have saved a lot of money.In reality, as you note, problems which the socialist doesn't consider at all when setting up his (her) bureacracy will come up and will be devastating because the simple and powerful, but readily demagogued, mechanism of "wasteful" competition has been suppressed, along with the mechanism by which increased demand evokes increased supply.
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