Why is government-run health care so popular in Canada and the U.K., and probably everywher else it’s used? What do you think are the major problems that make their systems inferior (if you do think this) to a totally free-market system? Why don’t the people recognize these problems (once again, if there’s anything to recognize)?
Is it true that there are dangerously-long waiting periods? Do they really pay less per capita on health-care? Are there any drawbacks to this?
The same reason minimum wage laws are so popular: state propaganda.
Well. Countries like Canada and France claim to have universal health care, but they don’t actually even offer basic coverage to most of their workers.
Why? Most of their workers are living in poverty in other countries. Thats neo-imperialism for you. It’ll prop up even totally dysfunctional socialist economies. So the success of western socialism doesn’t prove that socialism works, it proves that debt-slavery works.
Sometimes.
Well, we have a lot of protection on our domestic medical services… the only thing worse than actual socialism is corporate socialism.
I lived in London for a couple years. The only time I ever needed healthcare was after I got jumped at a bus stop and needed some stitches in my head. I had to wait 3 hours to see the doctor.
It was “free” in that I didn’t directly have to pay the doctor for his services. It wasn’t “free” in that I was charged, via taxes, every month I worked there for healthcare I neither used nor needed…
That is interesting but what if, in an hypothetical case, you need a million dollars surgery.
What would happen in that case in the british system?
It isn’t popular. Health care is the #1 issue in elections in Canada. In my recent two week trip to UK I asked people what they thought of NHS and nobody had positive comments. The first words I heard when I turned on the TV there at my lodge were “the failing NHS” on BBC.
No it is extremely popular in the UK. People love to slate it, but the solution presented is always the same - that it should be better funded, as well as the usual political buzzwords like more accountability and transparency. People look at me like I’m a traitor to my country, and don’t care a bit for poor people, whenever I so much as hint that a free market might be superior to the NHS. I put this mostly down to BBC propaganda, as well as general misunderstanding of economics.
As for the problems, waiting times are a big one, though apparently things have improved since 1997 when Labour came in and upped NHS funding. Most people don’t really see waiting lists as a problem though, and certainly don’t attribute it to lack of a free market. They just accept that that’s the way things are. As an example, at my local surgery there is a 4-week wait for ear syringing. And it usually takes a week to see a GP, unless it’s an “emergency”. A&E is a nightmare as well.
Also, there are a lot of hypochondriacs in Britain because of the NHS… people go to their GP for the most minor ills. Tragedy of the commons. And there are some treatments just not available at all, hence the recent trend of ‘healthcare tourism’ where people fly to India or somewhere like that to avoid the long waits for complex surgery, or surgery not available on the NHS.
As for efficiency, no it isn’t cheaper per capita than a free market - how could it be? Taxes are crippling, and the service is terrible. I don’t know how it compares to the U.S. corporatist system in terms of efficiency, but I’d be surprised if the U.S. system was not more efficient.
Socialized health insurance was presented to me in school like a precious gem seized by bold, altruistic father figure politicians from the clutches of greedy businessmen and capitalists. And it was hinted that the establishment of socialized health insurance (and pensions, and disability insurance) was a big watershed event that finally lifted the masses from desperate poverty.
So, when you argue “we should have a free market in health care”, many people hear “we should have desperate poverty again”. It’s fear, I think, not actual satisfaction that fosters these systems.
They wouldn’t give that surgery to you.
In order to meet the reduced price of socialised healthcare, governments provide less quantity and less quality of healthcare service. Price-demand law; since government meets the cost of healthcare, they also try as much as possible to reduce that cost for themselves, and provided much poorer service for the resultant reduced price.
A hypothetical million dollar surgery would never happen. There are many MANY cases of British healthcare outright refusing to give treatment, because they simply can not give it. There are mothers who have been forced to give birth to dead babies in the toilets of those hospitals, for heaven’s sake, because even their basic maternity services are lacking.
I remember Daniel Hannan saying something about how people in the UK who have received healthcare outside the country to generally have leser opinions of it, rather than those who have always lived inside the system and take the queing, inefficiency and irresponsiveness of the current system as a given, an inevitable “fact of life.”
He also mentioned how it is the only remaining relic of war time planning.
Well, I believe not-for-profit NHS trusts manage the budgets of specific areas so it would need to be decided by the doctors and bureaucrats. Hint: there are more and better paid managers in the NHS than full-time nurses!
Government run health care is awful. I know a few people in Canada who had to endure ridiculous waiting periods for routine procedures. At least in some Eastern European nations, you can bribe the doctors and nurses for better accommodations and faster/better service. I doubt that would go over well in Canada or the UK.