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HOW SOCIALIZED MEDICINE KILLS THE PATIENT AND ROBS THE TAXPAYER

When it comes to something as important as healthcare, the last thing anyone should want is for the entire system to become a government-run monopoly.

Shortly before “Obamacare” became law, I received a letter from a Canadian woman praying that Americans did not adopt Canadian-style, socialist healthcare. She told me the story of how her six-year-old son suddenly became violently ill (she suspected appendicitis), was rushed to an emergency room, and was ignored by medical staff despite his mother’s pleas.¹ A doctor finally strolled into their stark, filthy waiting room, dismissed the child’s vomiting and soaring fever as “just a bug,” but ordered blood tests to pacify the mother. Six hours later the tests revealed that the child was indeed suffering from appendicitis and was whisked away for an emergency appendectomy. The child’s appendicitis was so severe that the surgeon surmised that the child was minutes from dying. It reminded the mother that she had recently read of three other people sent home from this same hospital’s emergency room who had later died of appendicitis. After she shared her experience of Canada’s “Soviet-style emergency rooms” on Facebook, dozens more stories appeared there, written by Canadians with similar experiences.

It is a testament to the power of government propaganda that in Britain and Canada socialized medicine is popular because it is “free”—or, in other words, hidden in taxes; and because the government runs monopolies, Canadian health care is actually far more expensive, and the quality far less than it would be if doctors and hospitals had to compete for patients on the basis of quality and price.

It is a myth, of course, but widely believed in Europe, thanks to decades of socialist propaganda, that the poor and elderly receive no healthcare in the United States. Federal law actually requires hospitals to treat “indigent-care patients,” and Medicaid and Medicare—themselves highly flawed socialist programs—provide coverage for lower-income and over-sixty-five Americans. These are not exactly secrets; Europe’s (and Canada’s) leftist politicians purposely lie about this subject in order to deceive their populations about the alleged benefits of healthcare socialism in their countries.

In fact, socialist healthcare is based almost entirely on deception. It works this way: patients usually pay nothing (or a miniscule fee) at the point of service, thereby forming the false impression that healthcare is “free.” Because it is “free,” consumer demand for healthcare skyrockets; doctors prescribe hordes of often unnecessary tests, because they are “free” to the patient. The costs of providing healthcare, including everything from nursing to ambulance services, inevitably go through the roof. This is why former Texas Senator Phil Gramm, who holds a Ph.D. in economics and taught at Texas A&M University before becoming a congressman and then a senator, said of the Clinton administration plan for healthcare socialism in the 1990s: “There’s not enough money in the world to pay for it.” As any freshman economics student should know, declaring anything to be a “free” good or service will cause an explosion of demand, which in turn will ratchet up the costs of providing the good or service.

To cover up these costs, socialist governments typically impose price ceilings on everything from doctors’ visits and salaries to hospital room rates and technology. A price ceiling is a government-imposed price that is below the existing price. The effect is to stimulate the demand for healthcare services even more. Supply never catches up, generating shortages in everything from doctors to MRI machines. Indeed, after the British and Canadians socialized their healthcare industries and imposed price ceilings on doctors’ salaries, there was a massive “brain drain,” as highly educated medical professionals migrated to countries like the United States where they could earn a better living.

Governments always respond to the shortages that their policies created by imposing some kind of rationing. In Britain more than one million people are waiting to be admitted to hospitals at any one time; in Canada, one study found that 876,000 people were waiting for treatments; in Norway more than 270,000 people are daily waiting for hospital admissions and other medical treatment; and in New Zealand, some 90,000 people wait for medical care on any given day.²

Canadian patients waited more than eight weeks to see a specialist and then another nine-and-a-half weeks before treatment, including surgery. In New Zealand, the average waiting time for elderly patients in need of hip- or knee-replacement surgery is between 300 and 400 days. Some people in New Zealand waited for two years for their surgeries.³

An investigation by a British newspaper found that delays in treatment for colon cancer patients were so long that 20 percent of the cases were incurable by the time they finally received “treatment.” The same was true of lung cancer patients; and 25 percent of British cardiac patients die waiting for treatment.⁴

Not surprisingly, those who can afford it seek treatment in other countries, like the United States. This is especially true of Canadians. Those who cannot afford it are simply out of luck. This despite the fact that healthcare socialism is always sold politically as a program to help “the poor” under the mindless slogan of “Healthcare for All.”

Many British, Canadian, and other victims of healthcare socialism die waiting in line for what in the U.S. would be quick and routine medical treatment. In Canada, a young, eighteen-year-old girl named Laura Hillier died while waiting for a bone marrow transplant. An Ontario hospital claimed that it had thirty people waiting for the treatment but could only afford to perform five per month.⁵ “Healthcare for All” obviously doesn’t include people like Laura Hillier and thousands of others each year just like her.

The United States is not completely immune from shortages thanks to socialist Medicaid and Medicare and the heavy regulation of the healthcare system. For example, doctors believe that hundreds of thousands of people on kidney dialysis would benefit from sixday-a-week treatment, but Medicare only covers three days because of “global budget controls.” Similar shortages occur in many other Medicare- or Medicaid-funded areas; “free” colonoscopies have led to shortages where in some parts of the United States patients must wait for months.⁶

But if one conducts an Internet search of “hospital shortages in Canada,” one discovers that the Canadian government is constantly issuing warnings to the public about nursing shortages,⁷ drug shortages,⁸ hospital bed shortages,⁹ medicine shortages,¹⁰ and doctor shortages.¹¹ Hospital bed shortages become so acute at times that hospital administrators resort to cancelling surgeries; allowing patients to languish on stretchers in cold, dirty, disease-infected hallways; and discharging them before they should, simply to make room for other patients. Such conditions have led to numerous outbreaks of infectious diseases in Canadian hospitals.¹²

Advocates of “single-payer healthcare” (single-payer means the taxpayer) in the American media rarely reveal the horrors of such a system in other countries, but every once in a while the truth slips out. One example is a January 16, 2000, New York Times article by James Brooke entitled “Full Hospitals Make Canadians Wait and Look South.” The article revealed very interesting information about price control-induced shortages in Canada: a fifty-eight-year-old grandmother on a five-year waiting list for heart surgery awaited open-heart surgery in a Montreal hospital hallway with sixty-six other patients as electric doors opened and closed all night long, bringing in drafts from below-zero weather; twenty-three of Toronto’s twenty-five hospitals turned away ambulances in a single day because of a doctor shortage; Vancouver ambulances were “stacked up for hours” while heart attack victims waited in them; and at least 1,000 Canadian doctors had recently migrated to the United States to avoid price controls on their salaries. “Few Canadians would recommend their system as a model for export,” Mr. Brooke concluded.¹³

Contrary to the “Healthcare for All” rhetoric of the advocates of healthcare socialism, in the real world socialized healthcare is grossly inequitable because of the realities of politics and government. Whenever government allocates resources—for healthcare or anything else—the more affluent in society will always receive a disproportionate share of the benefits at the expense of the less affluent. As Friedrich Hayek once said, under socialism the only power worth having is political power, and the affluent are always better at wielding political power than are the poor.

As The Guardian, a British newspaper, concluded after researching the allocation of healthcare services by the British National Health Service: “Generally speaking, the poorer you are and the more socially deprived your area, the worse your care and access [to healthcare] is likely to be.”¹⁴ A British publication called The Good Hospital Guide found great disparities in access to healthcare, with the best-performing hospitals “near the wealthiest sectors of the city,” whereas the hospitals with the worst performance “are located in east London, the most economically depressed area of the city.”¹⁵ The Guide found that hospitals in wealthier parts of the city had four times the number of doctors per one hundred patients as were found in the poorest parts of the city. Even more extreme inequalities in healthcare provision are found in the Canadian version of healthcare socialism. Spending on medical specialists was found in one study to be four times higher in affluent Vancouver than in poorer areas; per capita spending was three times higher in general; and residents of Vancouver benefited by as much as a thirty-to-one difference in the number of certain medical specialists available compared to poorer parts of British Columbia.¹⁶

Government rationing of medical technology is pervasive in countries with “single-payer,” socialized healthcare. On a per capita basis, the United States has more than three times as many MRI units as Canada does; twice as many CT scanners; and much of the medical technology that does exist in Canada is archaic and obsolete compared to American medical technology.¹⁷

Socialist healthcare rationing can be especially bad for older patients, because they are seen as drags on the system. In Britain, for instance, even though one-third of all diagnosed cancers are in patients seventy-five years old or older, the British National Health Service does not provide cancer screening to those over sixty-five; and only one in fifty lung cancer patients over seventy-five receives surgery.¹⁸ Some commentators have charged the British National Health Service with practicing “euthanasia.” Even if euthanasia was not the intent of the British government, it has been the effect of healthcare socialism in that country. In Sweden, the government actually instructed doctors to “prioritize” patients according to their status as future taxpayers. The elderly are at the bottom of that list, since they are mostly retired and paying relatively little in taxes but receiving a relatively large share of government services.¹⁹

Just as America embarks on the road to healthcare socialism with the adoption of “Obamacare,” most European countries with socialized medicine are moving away from it by introducing market-oriented reforms that introduce a larger degree of private-sector competition in healthcare industries. In England more than seven million people have private health insurance and the British National Health Service is treating patients in private hospitals. There is now almost as much private-sector healthcare in Australia as in the United States as a percentage of all healthcare; Sweden allows private healthcare providers to supply almost half of all healthcare services and allows private health insurance; and the Canadian government spends more than $1 billion per year on healthcare services for Canadians delivered by American healthcare providers.²⁰ Thousands of Canadians essentially take healthcare “privatization” into their own hands each year by traveling to the United States for care.

THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF HEALTHCARE SOCIALISM

The Soviet Union was the first country to promise “cradle-to-grave,” government-run healthcare coverage with all the same rhetoric that politicians in democratic countries now use: “the right to health,” “healthcare for all,” and all the rest of the clichés. Economist Yuri Maltsev, a professor at Carthage College in Wisconsin who was once an economic advisor to Mikhail Gorbachev, wrote that after decades of “fine tuning” healthcare socialism, “healthcare institutions in Russia were at least a hundred years behind the average U.S. level.”²¹ He described Russian hospitals during the peak of Russian socialism as characterized by “filth, odors, cats roaming the halls, drunken medical personnel, and absence of soap and cleaning supplies. . . .”²² Even the Russian government admitted that almost 80 percent of AIDS patients contracted the disease through dirty needles or HIV-tainted blood from the state-run hospitals.

Neurosurgeons were paid about one-third of what bus drivers were paid, said Professor Maltsev, which would not exactly attract the best and brightest to medical education. Patients had to pay bribes to be treated. Unscrupulous doctors solicited bribes by refusing to use anesthesia unless the patient paid up. In order to “improve” statistics about hospital deaths, “patients were routinely shoved out the door just before taking their last breath.” The Russian system of healthcare socialism was characterized by “criminal negligence, bribes taken by medical apparatchiks, drunken ambulance crews, and food poisoning in hospitals and child-care facilities,” said Maltsev.²³ After years of healthcare socialism, 57 percent of all Russian hospitals did not even have running hot water, and 36 percent of hospitals in rural areas did not have water or sewage treatment at all.²⁴

For example, Maltsev recalled “the case of a fourteen-year-old girl from my district [he was a “People’s Deputy” in Moscow from 1987-1989] who died of acute nephritis in a Moscow hospital. She died because a doctor decided that it was better to save ‘precious’ X-ray film (imported by the Soviets for hard currency) instead of double-checking his diagnosis. . . . Instead, the doctor treated the teenager with a heat compress, which killed her almost instantly.”²⁵ To make matters worse, “There was no legal remedy for the girl’s parents and grandparents. By definition, a single-payer system cannot allow any such remedy. . . . The doctor received no official reprimand.”²⁶

The Soviet Union, like all socialist countries, had a multi-tiered system where the political ruling class was exempted from the squalor of the hospitals that catered to the masses. They had special hospitals, special rooms, and all the medicine in the world reserved for themselves. As George Orwell might have said, with socialism all men are created equal, only some are more equal than others. Who in his right mind would want to emulate such a system except for the ruling political class that intends to exempt itself from all the squalor and horrors of socialized medicine?

There is nothing about all of this that was unique to the Soviet Union, Maltsev concluded. “It is a direct result of the government monopoly on healthcare and it can happen in any country. . . . Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere. In fact, both analytical reasoning and empirical evidence point to the opposite conclusion. But the dismal failure of socialized medicine to raise people’s health and longevity has not affected its appeal for politicians, administrators, and their intellectual servants in search of absolute power and control.”²⁷