Socialized Health Care Irony: Institutionalized Unfairness

We’ve examined government health care at considerable length at Dakota Voice, including the threat it presents to the elderly.

Rupert Darwall’s pice at the Wall Street Journal examines some of the assumptions held by pro-socialized medicine advocates in light of international examples of how this works not on paper but in real life.

The real justification for socialized medicine is left unstated: Because health-care resources are assumed to be fixed, those resources should be prioritized for those who can benefit most from medical treatment. Thus the NHS acts as Britain’s national triage service, deciding who is most likely to respond best to treatment and allocating health care accordingly.

It should therefore come as no surprise that the NHS is institutionally ageist. The elderly have fewer years left to them; why then should they get health-care resources that would benefit a younger person more? An analysis by a senior U.K.-based health-care expert earlier this decade found that in the U.S. health-care spending per capita goes up steeply for the elderly, while the U.K. didn’t show the same pattern. The U.K.’s pattern of health-care spending by age had more in common with the former Soviet bloc.

A scarcity assumption similar to the British mentality underlies President Barack Obama’s proposed health-care overhaul. “We spend one-and-a-half times more per person on health care than any other country, but we aren’t any healthier for it,” Mr. Obama claimed in his address to Congress last Wednesday, a situation that, he said, threatened America’s economic competitiveness.

This assertion is seldom challenged. Yet what makes health care different from spending on, say, information technology—or any category of consumer service—such that spending on health care is uniquely bad for the American economy? Distortions like malpractice suits that lead to higher costs or the absence of consumer price consciousness do result in a misallocation of resources. That should be an argument for tackling those distortions. But if high health-care spending otherwise reflects the preferences of millions of consumers, why the fuss?

The case for ObamaCare, as with the NHS, rests on what might be termed the “lump of health care” fallacy. But in a market-based system triggering one person’s contractual rights to health care does not invalidate someone else’s health policy. Instead, increased demand for health care incentivizes new drugs, new therapies and better ways of delivering health care. Government-administered systems are so slow and clumsy that they turn the lump of health-care fallacy into a reality.

It is true that in a free market system, some people are always going to be able to afford more and will get more than another. But then–that’s life! There will always be those who work harder or employ their creativity more and thus reap greater rewards. There will also always be those who sometimes suffer setbacks through no fault of their own; it’s an imperfect world we live in.

But the socialist approach–while attractive on the surface to those who have fewer resources–is no better. Instead of allowing the law of chance and the law of investments and rewards to dictate the distribution of resources, it implements an artificial, institutional tool that gives to those with less…by stealing from those who have more. In other words, it drags everyone down to the lowest common denominator or, in common vernacular, spreads the misery around more equally (while sewing contempt on hard work and innovation). Of course, as in George Orwell’s Animal Farm, those who are controlling this institutional misery dispenser will always be “more equal” than everyone else.

What’s more, despite the foolish attempt of socialists to make the world a fair place, the imperfect nature of our fallen world ensures such attempts will always fail, and artificial means to ignore that nature will usually make things much worse.  This makes itself evident in the allocation-of-resources plans seen in the British National Health Service and in the writings of Obama-advisor Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

Human beings will ALWAYS be different, whether it be through their genetic predisposition toward disease, their size, their age, or whatever.  In order to be “fair” to the majority, institutional systems of redistribution must determine where resources would be wasted and take draconian steps to stem that waste where possible.  Those human beings of least practical value to the state (e.g. infants, the disabled, the elderly) will always be in the crosshairs of that system, because as this “artificial fairness” apparatus sees it, they (infants, disabled, elderly) are threats to equal distribution and must be cut off regardless of their need.

I have always preferred a free system where I have greater input into the equation (whether it be through my hard work, my creativity, my appeal to others for help, or something else within my control) than one controlled by a monolithic government institution that is usually distant, unresponsive, with endless layers of bureaucracy and no higher level of appeal. The free-market systems takes human nature into account and works it’s negative aspects against each other to cancel out unrestrained negative consequences, effecting a remarkably fair outcome with opportunity for private charity to help make up for the unavoidable shortfalls.

No wonder Americans have enjoyed such a system for over 200 years.  In fact, such a preference is at the heart of the American way of life and is legally enshrined in the limited-government nature of the U.S. Constitution.

But the insanity of adopting a socialist health care system goes even beyond the institutionalized theft and “spread the misery” lunacy.

Because of its assault on human creativity, industry and rewards (i.e. working at odds with human nature), along with the bureaucratic inefficiency and waste that always comes with bigger government, it will retard innovation and reduce access to the latest medical innovation.

According to the 2002 Wanless report, used by Tony Blair’s government to justify a large tax hike to fund the higher spending, the NHS is late to adopt and slow to diffuse new technology. Still, NHS spending more than doubled to £103 billion in 2009-10 from £40 billion in 1999-2000, equivalent to an average growth rate of over 7% a year after inflation.

The Wanless report said that of the countries it looked at, only the United States (you know, the country liberals love to bash for being “unlike the rest of the world”) was the only one to be early in innovation and diffusion of new medical advancements.

Yes, there’s a reason the United States isn’t like the rest of the world: we still have an element of free-market element left, and we’re better than the rest of the world because of it.

Only slackers and malcontents want to aim for the lowest common denominator.

Note: Reader comments are reviewed before publishing, and only salient comments that add to the topic will be published. Profanity is absolutely not allowed and will be summarily deleted. Spam, copied statements and other material not comprised of the reader’s own opinion will also be deleted.