Is free health care worth it? You sure? What if the cost is the needless loss of your leg?
Socialized health care is only "free" if you don't count all the costs.
You have to be careful these days when you hear a story that seems outrageous. It doesn’t matter if it’s from a “legacy journalism” source or an independent reporter on the interwebs.
Both types of entities are interested in clicks and engagement, and are more than willing to misrepresent a story or use a dishonest headline or leave inconvenient or contrary facts buried deep in the text (or out of the article all together).
That said, the following story seems legit, and it’s outrageous.
Americans have long been told how stupid and backwards we are to have a “private” health care system as opposed to the more civilized socialized health care systems of enlightened countries like the United Kingdom and Canada.
Now, don’t be fooled. We don’t have a private or free market health care system in the US, and haven’t for over a century. Nothing even close. But that’s an article for another day.
Opponents of socialized health care (like me) point out that it is impossible for government to direct resources efficiently. And worse, that in such a system all the incentives of consumers, providers, and manufacturers are misaligned. Because of this, horrible outcomes will be much more common compared to a free market.
Specifically, the UK’s and Canada’s socialized medical systems are famous for their long waiting times to see a doctor, their shortages of staff, equipment, facilities, and… well… competent health care.
A famous example is that it’s much quicker and easier to get an MRI for the family pet at a private veterinarian than it is to get one for yourself in Canada’s socialized health care system. Sure, it’s expensive, but “free” doesn’t account for shortages, wait times, and lower quality care.
None of this is surprising to anyone who has studied economics, but ideologues (and the ignorant masses) don’t often do that, so socialized health care is very popular — at least for those who don’t use it much.
Roseanne Milburn (pictured above) had to use Canada’s “free” health care, and ended up paying a tragically high cost — her leg.
She had knee replacement surgery (after waiting on a list for six years!) and developed complications afterwards. Two months after the surgery, this occurred (from linked article above):
In late November, a surgeon at Winnipeg's Health Sciences Centre began removing dead tissue from her right knee, with the intention of stitching her up later that day after she was seen by an orthopedic surgeon at Concordia Hospital.
She was sent to Concordia, but couldn't be transferred back to HSC because there wasn't a bed available for the specialist to finish the procedure. Instead, she spent eight days languishing at Concordia with a painful open wound.
Once she finally got to HSC, Milburn went under the knife for another infection, but due to the long delay in stitching up the wound, she said she was told her leg wasn't salvageable.
Eight days on her back with an open wound waiting for someone to stitch her up. Of course she got a hideous infection. I can’t imagine what this woman suffered through — and is currently suffering through. That is just awful.
The article isn’t explicit, but if it took two months after the knee surgery to detect a problem and address it, I can’t imagine the post-op care was very timely either.
Supporters of this type of socialism will claim that these kinds of bad outcomes are rare, and they are correct. This was extreme. But the long wait times and shortages aren’t rare, they are endemic. They are baked into the system. And the probability of a terrible outcome is ever-present — and much higher than would exist in a purely free market system.
We often throw around the phrase, “You get what you pay for.” It’s not just a slogan. There is a deep truth there. It’s a shame so many people ignore that truth in the most critically important areas there is — our health.
Thanks to @RobynUrback on X where I first saw this story.
Naturally,
Adam
I, too, was naively hyper-libertarian once, about 15 years ago. I recommend looking at a wide variety of aggregate data, and it will soon be clear that blaming the government for literally every problem was always going to be too simplistic of a worldview.
There has never been a successful libertarian society. All successful societies have combined a lot of capitalism with significant socialism, including the US.
Public schooling, so that children born into poor families can get an education? That's socialism.
A fire department paid for with tax dollars? That's socialism.
A police department? That's socialism, too.
The police are very flawed, but having no police is empirically worse for everyone except for those who are highly skilled at organized crime, since they become the de facto government and rulers in that country, just like we see in Mexico today.
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There are frankly many important oversimplifications in the above post I'm replying to, but I'll try to be brief:
1. The relevant comparison between "socialized" medicine and what the US has is not a (usually good and very rarely botched) surgery versus a perfect surgery, but bad surgery versus no surgery at all. Americans without healthcare don't wait in line, and thus certainly don't wait in line for longer than people who _do_ have healthcare!
2. If competition is part of what makes capitalism so great (and I do think it is), then let's bring on the competition and have a public option.
3. Canada's healthcare model is very different from the UK's, but you grouped them together. I think the US should adopt a model, not like the UK where the government owns the hospitals (and thus indeed has no incentive to control costs), but instead do something similar to what Canada and Germany do, where the hospitals are privately owned. The part that is socialistic is that citizens join forces to group-buy healthcare instead of each buying their own. This group buying has always been done via the government, where the gov't becomes the "single payer" (buyer) of healthcare for everyone as a group, so that we can negotiate lower prices.
Thanks to the internet, it is possible to use something like Kickstarter to literally group-buy healthcare _without_ the government needing to be involved; it would be very interesting to see some country try!