The Soviet Unionization of Health Care
Posted: March 20th, 2010 | Author: admin | Filed under: Health Care, Insurance | Tags: Democrat, doctors, drug companies, economy, general practitioner, health care system, health insurance, health-care reform, hospitals, insurers, nurses, OPM, other people’s money, socialized medicine | No Comments »Few of us relish paying for health care, but when we do, amazing things happen: Strangers listen to us and try to give us what we want. There’s a simple economic rule that what we pay for, we control. Insurers, hospitals, doctors, nurses, and drug companies listen to us when their livelihood depends on it. The more you take the individual customer/patient out of the equation, the more power we individuals lose.
The “health-care reform” currently touted by Beltway Democrats would take a system that insulates patients from the true cost of their health care — and insulate them more. It’s a scheme for spending even more of OPM (other people’s money). The Soviet Union ran the granddaddy of such schemes, even putting the cradle-to-grave “right to health” in its constitution. If we are smart, we will learn from the Soviets’ failed seventy-year experiment, which succeeded in putting people into early graves.
Take the individual out completely, as the defunct Soviet system did with all industries, and the individual becomes irrelevant. The Soviet government was the only purchaser that mattered and, consequently, the government, not consumers, told producers what to make. When the state tried setting quantity quotas for nails, factories produced lots of little, pin-like nails. When the state set quotas by weight, factories responded predictably and produced big, heavy nails.