Paul Krugman has told us that awful stories about government-run healthcare in Britain “are false.”
I guess this means that the media must be dominated by conservative liars, since we keep getting reports about substandard care and needless deaths (see here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and here).
And the Boston Globe and Associated Press must be part of this vast right-wing conspiracy, because the Globe just ran an AP report exposing more problems in England. Here is an excerpt.
When David Evans needed a hernia operation, the 69-year-old farmer became so alarmed by the long wait that he used an ultrasound machine for pregnant sheep on himself, to make sure he wasn’t getting worse. It was only after repeated calls from himself, his doctor and his local member of parliament that the hospital performed the surgery, nearly a year after it was first requested. Under government guidelines, he should have started getting treatment within 18 weeks. “I was in quite a lot of pain,’’ Evans said of his ordeal in Cornwall, southwest England. “It really restricted what I could do around the farm since I couldn’t lift anything heavy.’’ Across Britain, an increasing number of patients like Evans are facing more pain and longer waits.
The deep flaws in the British system, by the way, do not imply that the American system is ideal. As I’ve explained, the U.S. system also is heavily dominated by government, causing a massive third-party payer problem.
(h/t: Reason)
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Whenever government tries to provide any sort of “service” there’s a problem. There’s no direct link between the taxpaying consumer and the service provided. So there’s no incentive to do a better job.
Firing government employees is very difficult so sanctioning one doing a bad job is very difficult. Which means there’s little disincentive against doing a terrible job.
An entrepreneur with a great idea and the desire to produce wealth will do a far better job than any number of government employees who can neither make a fortune nor go bankrupt. Since a government employee has no significant stake in the outcome, customer satisfaction is largely irrelevant.
Governments generally make competition illegal, all of which means government failure is natural. This is indeed government failure, and most of us have had experience of it. We need to label it as such, popularize and widely use the term. Associating government with failure could help make a much-needed dent in the universal belief in government..
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Some people ask, if socialized medicine is so bad why is it popular in those countries that have it? The answere is simple: the vast majority of citizens are healthy, often medical treatment is nothing more than a doctor visit (that takes forever to have) and a few pills. The people assume that guarinteed health care means QUALTIY health care. Never having been really sick they do not know what a disaster socialized medicine is when it comes treating serous medical conditions.
Those who are brutalized by the reality of socialized medicine are, at any one time, a minority to small to influence public opinion, and overcome public ignorance about their own government’s programs.
But eventueally, when age and life happens, everyone becomes a part of that small minority.
Socialized medicine is a disaster and always will be, in all of its various forms. We know this from historical experience.
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Hey Danieljmitchell,
On a similar note,, … Just Curious because I don’t want to run into this problem when I start my Bachelors program next month. I have a couple friends who told me horror stories about financial aid not covering their full tuition and they ended up dropping out and owing the university thousands. Now they are in a runt and can’t get back in school. How can I avoid this problem?
Kindest Regards
I agree wholeheartedly that Krugman, as well as Keynes, hold (held?) to arrant economic nonsense. I too have spent much time exploring the evidence, which I why I hold the opinions I hold.
But there’s generally a reason somewhere. So now I’m wondering what Krugman’s reason could be for continuing to hold such views?
To crisbd:
I do not have the arrogance to assume that Mr Mirenda does not know how to spell his own name. The problem here is that once you send a comment you cannot correct it (that is the reason I made 2 comments here; I needed to correct my first comment).
I tough that Mr. Mirenda had made a typographical error and Mr. Mirenda was not able to correct it -or never saw it-. That´s all. No arrogance in this.
I wanted to be sure if his actual name was Miranda since I may know in person a John Miranda (sadly I am pretty sure that I do not know Mr. John Mirenda)
I do not have the arrogance to think that my toughts are infallible, I have spent a big part of my time in search of the true laws of economics. If you think John Maynard Keynes “General Theory of Employment” shows the true laws of economics then I must say that I totally disagree. Not only Keynes does not bother to verify his theories against facts but most of his main findings are nonsense. I am not, like Paul Krugman, someone who trumpets that nonsense as science. It is just a matter of time, the internet through blogs like this one will demolish those big piles of nonsense in Krugman and Keynes.
I do not pretend to know every nonsense but if you read carefully Keynes you see his errors. Most of them were already shown by Henry Hazlitt.
John Mirenda, I have the same problem. People see my name Cris and some have the same arrogance to assume that I don’t know how to spell my own name!
Makes you wonder what else they assume is fact (correct or incorrect without checking the empirical evidence. Such self-sabotage is rife among people such as Krugman, who are so convinced their thoughts are infallible that they are willing to argue black is white!
The most pernicious effect of welfare-state unconditional guarantees for services is not their cost or quality, but the general demotivation they infuse in the entire production process, the wellspring of prosperity. Demotivation by discouraging people from engaging in high value productive work and compromise to choices of lifetime mediocrity.
The cost to quality ratio of these welfare-state mandatory monopoly healthcare systems is generally low compared to other freer industries. However, one could argue that the quality/cost ratio of the US healthcare system is even lower, because of the very high costs. That is because the US healthcare system exists in that unstable in-between space between socialism and capitalism. That is the space where an industry has been gradually loaded with enough regulation (medical regulation in this case), protectionism and subsidies to prevent it from functioning as a free market, yet there is not quite enough regulation to prevent various entities, groups and cronies involved from gaming the environment to their advantage, so that they can, of course, minimize their personal effort/reward ratio in a less-competitive more-protected environment.
So there are two paths for this now unstable US healthcare system:
(a) either make it more free market, which will unleash the dynamism, efficiency and higher quality/cost ratios that are typical of free markets,
or,
(b) regulate it and constrain it ever more until it inevitably becomes completely socialized.
It is obvious which path the majority of American people have chosen, either directly or indirectly (through HopNChange). Obamacare alone will add significant additional distortions that will further decrease the quality/cost ratio, until the entire system is soon nationalized in an outburst of national frustration and/or crisis. It will become impossible to move in direction (a) by virtue of the millions of people that will have become dependent on someone else paying most of their healthcare, which is what ObamaCare implements when it comes in full force in 2014:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704628404576265692304582936.html
———————
That is the healthcare cost and quality portion of the equation. But as I said in the beginning, that is the lesser of the two effects when it comes to continued US affluence which has the average American so far enjoying a taken-for-granted prosperity level equaling six times world average.
The most pernicious effect that unconditional uniform quality (even if mediocre quality) nationalized healthcare has on a nations prosperity is its wicked effect on the totality of motivation to engage in high value productive work — and in the way it promotes people’s complacency to lifetime choices of mediocrity.
When some (perhaps mediocre) healthcare, education and modest retirement is given to anyone unconditionally, regardless of value contributed through personal work (past, present and future), how many people are really and honestly willing to go beyond mere mediocrity in their work, and with how much passion and fervor? Especially when any reward for exceptional work will be severely trimmed to provide the basics for those who have predictably chosen a lifetime of mediocrity? Not enough, as Europe is now finally finding out.
Sure we can all have Martini parties and cumbaya political rallies where we all claim that we would be so grateful in such an egalitarian environment that we would day-in day-out jump out of the house leaving our beloved family and children behind to go to work not in mediocrity but in exceptionalism, for the benefit of distant unknowns …but really,… is this really how it is? Is this really what YOU would do the next day, the next month, the next year and decades, when the buzz is gone, the election placards are down and it’s time to go to work inventing and developing things that no one else has thought before?
Look inside yourself honestly and answer: How much of your wealth are you willing to give to a friend in need? To a distant unknown? How much have you given in the past? How much would you be willing to separate yourself from your children and family to go work most of the day when a large portion of your work will be confiscated to help a friend in need? A friend who chose mediocrity (and mediocrity he will choose if you cover his basic needs unconditionally)? A distant unknown?
Unconditional guarantees, paid by others, inevitably breed indolence. The sequence of events is well known through history (though Americans seem oblivious to it):
Low motivation = Low production = Perpetual compounding of slow growth into lower prosperity affecting everyone. It’s only a matter of time, a short time — a couple of decades at most.
There is no free lunch, only lunches paid by others. But how motivated is one to work to provide lunch for others? In such a world, there is soon a shortage of lunches.
But no, it ain’t so. People are good, they are well behaved collectivists, people will appreciate and if you give FIRST they will subsequently work with fervor in gratitude to pay back,…. and if they don’t… well… if they don’t, which they will not, Paul Krugman will employ macroeconomics to turn two fish and five loaves of motivation into six times average worldwide prosperity. Other nations have no Paul Krugmen, so this will be our unique secret to superior prosperity.
So the pipe dream lives on, and western world decline continues…. Not only continues, but is now entering a swift phase where we descend down in a vicious spiral of ever more misery, ever more central planning, ever more collectivism, ever more redistribution, followed by new layers of misery… and so on… to swift decline. What was the solution to miseries brought by socialism two generations after its implementation? Well, even more socialism. What is the solution to a European crisis brought upon by now finally sub-par personal motivation to produce? Well… more European welfare state, with the old dis-incentivizing intra-country wealth transfers now being augmented by additional cross-country wealth transfers in a pan-European transfer union.
No it won’t take seventy years, as communism, for the welfare state to fold. We live in a much faster and ever accelerating world. The three billion people in the emerging world who are finally getting their, albeit partial personal freedoms, have little desire or patience to see how the less than one billion western world lemmings finally conclude their pipe dream of socialism. They will take no prisoners.
So hang on dear Americans. Hang on to the hope of remaining atop the world’s prosperity ladder through military might and some form of effective HopNChange central planning yet undiscovered by humanity and civilizations past. Good luck to you! It’s “lights out”…
I appreciate your reply and for expanding on my comments. My name is indeed Mirenda. I am a long time resident of Costa Rica, born in the US.
I meant that the only way left in which the political class can take away HUGE AMOUNTS OF MONEY from us costa ricans is through a VAT. That is why the political class wants to punish us -against our will, of course-, with a full european style nauseating VAT
Very interesting comment from John Mirenda (I suppose he means Miranda) and from Mr Dan Mitchell. I am too from Costa Rica and we see here what economic theory predicts: Too much of what very few want -like big expensive bureaucracies- and too little of what people desperately need when the government provides services without market mechanisms. There are terrible waiting lists and payroll taxes in Costa Rica are as high as Europe´s.. I think those waiting lists have the same nature that the communism waiting lines for bread, butter, toilet paper, etc, etc.
We are so heavily taxed that the only way in which the political class can take away more money from us is by taxing with a Value Added Tax (VAT) almost everything that we pay inside Costa Rica.
Happily our Constitution impedes “fast track” when taxes are discussed in our congress and for 10 years the political class has been willing to punish costa ricans -against our will, of course- with a value added tax (VAT) that taxes practically everything paid inside Costa Rica. At this moment we already have a 13% VAT but many services are exempt and the political class drools at the tough of taxing with a higher rate VAT practically everything paid inside Costa Rica.
So far the attacks of the political class against the costa rican people have been unsuccesful because of the constitutional limits on using “fast track” for taxes. But sooner or later the political class attack will be successful. 80% of costa ricans oppose the VAT according to one opinion poll
Costa Rica has the typical non industrialized country pattern of high taxes and tax collection lower than european tax hells. We miraculously have avoided the horrifying high Value Added Taxes that Europe, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil (47% and more when all VATs are added!!) have.
We are seeing here the slow collapse of socialism as we know it, I think. Blogs like this one are bringing that fall. So much socialist nonsense perpetually coming from Paul Krugman , we already saw the collapse of communism, the Mass murder system where a small bunch of people had terrifying power over the people. I think we will soon see the collapse of socialism, the system where a very small arrogant socialist aristocracy has devastating power over people´s lives, a system tirelessly promoted by Paul Krugman.
Already no VAT Hong Kong and low VAT Singapore are the non oil producing countries that have the highest per capita GDP -in PPP dollars- along with low VAT Switzerland and non VAT USA and Tax Haven Luxembourg. If Hong Kong and Singapore, dirt poot in the 1960s, had followed the “advice” prevailing among Nobel Prize winning economists probably they would be now as poor as subsaharian Africa (when you read Peter Bauer you realize that).
It’s the same situation wherever govt runs healthcare. Here in Costa Rica everybody has access to health care through the countries’ celebrated social security system (Caja Costaricense de Seguridad Social). There are local diagnostic services, clinics, and major hospitals spread around the country. The system is financed thru payroll taxes on employers and employees, while unemployed or self employed can pay in and join as individuals. The agencies and hospitals are well staffed and provide quality care for those fortunate enough to get in. You can wait months for an appointment, and years for an operation, even an urgent one like breast cancer, which my wife’s aunt needs. So the family is paying for a private hospital to do the operation, which cannot wait. They are fortunate to have the means to pay for this operation. This situation is typical and has been highlighted in the local press for some time. Added to this problem is the fact that the system is bankrupt and that the political leaders cannot agree on how broke it is or how to fix it, and there is a catastrophe about to occur here, with dire consequences for this peaceful nation’s social compact. Stay tuned.
if “socialized” medicine is so bad, why is the health care system so relatively popular in countries like Canada and Great Britain when compared to the U.S.?
Ever notice that the popular outcry against the Canadian Health care system comes mostly from American Conservatives and not from Canadians themselves?