How to ruin health care

For all its faults, real or perceived, American health care is on the whole pretty good. Criticisms of it usually center around its lack of universality in insurance coverage. Many liberals in this country equate the "necessity" of having health insurance with the necessity of, say, breathing. This despite the fact that the overwhelming majority of hospitals do not turn away patients for lack of an ability to pay. (That is, in fact, a good part of the reason you can expect to pay $7 for a single aspirin in a hospital.)

Those who argue in favor of universal health care often do so from a gross ignorance of basic economics. Everything that universal health care is supposed to do, such as sheltering patients from the true cost of service, and increasing the customer base to 100% of the population, actually put strong upward pressure on prices. Since it also controls costs by force, though, the result is a significant decrease in both the quantity and quality of care.

This is especially evident in Canada's failing health care system, where new pharmaceuticals are introduced at less than half the rate as here in the States, and the waits for medical treatment are approaching ridiculous lengths. In England, kidney dialysis is seldom approved for anyone over the age of 55, because the limited medical resources are considered better spent on younger people who don't have just a decade or two to live anyway. And in many countries with socialized medicine, medical expenditures (the costs that the end patient isn't supposed to feel the effects of) are gobbling up budgets despite sharply rationed care.

Now, the Peoples' Republic of California may be following these other dimwits down the Feel-Good Road to Hell (paved, of course, with one part good intentions, to ten parts taxpayer moulah). As this well-researched article astutely points out, the consequences are almost inevitably going to be ruinous for both California's budget and health care industry, should they actually proceed with this. It would appear that once again, fundamental economic truths are being flat-out ignored in favor of feel-good political doctrine.

If this measure passes, I'd be tempted to chastise voters on their self-destructive decision, but most of them are simply the products of grossly incompetent public schools that teach little in the way of real, meaningful economics. The real people to blame are the politicians who vote in favor of bills like this, and especially the self-serving cretins who come up with these legislative cancers in the first place. They may not know much economics either (in fact I'm pretty sure they don't), but that does not lessen their culpability in voting for something that will ultimately decrease quality of health care and bankrupt future generations. Of course by the time the full effects of socialized medicine are felt in California, those who originally enacted it will have been out of office (and possibly deceased) for many years, leaving their successors--and all future Californians--to make the painful sacrifices and clean up the awful mess.

It's really a pity that there isn't some way of holding legislators personally responsible for such irresponsible, ignorant, ruinous, and costly acts. And no, I don't consider merely voting them out of office as any kind of accountability. Make the SOB's serve jail time, and have their fortunes & possessions liquidated and all future earnings confiscated as reparation (or at least the beginnings of reparations; how could one possibly repay tens of billions of dollars?). Yeah, I know that would never happen; politicians go to great lengths to shield themselves from any kind of real accountability for their legislative misdeeds. (Step one: vehemently deny they've ever passed any bad legislation.) But hey, we can dream of justice for our rulers, can't we?