Quick Takes – Rationing Healthcare, Misunderstanding Healthcare, Privatizing Healthcare?

     Another “quick takes” on items where there is too little to say to make a complete article, but is still important enough to comment on.

     The focus this time: Some People Support Free-Market Solutions; Some People Are Idiots

     First, a little mood music:

     Carrying on…

One of the promises of socialized healthcare is that by removing the “profit motive” the beneficent government will be able to provide plenty of everything to everyone because “consensus” and “democracy” or something…

     This, of course, is nonsense:

“Once technocrats seize power over a sector, its political nature is to determine winners and losers, favored and disfavored, in-crowds and out-crowds.

“That means rationing based on invidious determinations about whose lives matter more and whose less.”

     However, rationing is all the rage in the peer reviewed medical journals:

The Cost of Inappropriate Care at the End of life by ThePoliticalHat

     In other words, your “right to die” will be made for you… and against your will.

“The answer is to bar the door to some of the elderly, those in which wanted life-sustaining treatment ‘prolong the patient’s death,’ a very slippery concept that turns what is actually happening–keeping the patient alive longer–on its head.”

     Well, that’s just when we take it to the extreme, correct?  It’s no big deal if it’s “just the tip”… or not.

“Seeking to root his democratic socialism in American experiences, Sanders essentially proposed a return to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society and extending the economically activist government agendas associated with these endeavors. Freedom, Sanders maintained, requires government-provided economic security.

“… But it’s precisely such ‘moderate’ versions of socialism that were the primary object of Tocqueville’s worries.”

     As with a “right to a job”, a “right to healthcare” does not exist in any meaningful way just because it is declared to be so:

“Tocqueville, however, took a sharply contrasting position. If a right to work was written into France’s constitution, he argued, it would open the door to the state assuming an unprecedented degree of control over economic life. Why? Because to fulfill such a constitutional duty, Tocqueville claimed, the state would either have to force businesses to hire people or create as many government jobs as it took to eliminate unemployment. Either way, it would shatter economic freedom or fiscal rectitude.”

     And, indeed, reality always rears its head.

     Sometimes, when reality slaps you upside the face enough, you begin entertaining alternatives more amicable to reality:

“Wait times for elective surgeries in Canada are notoriously long, but a study released Tuesday found times dropped significantly in the Saskatchewan province after private, for-profit clinics were introduced to the area.

“…

“The companies chosen for the private clinics were required to sign contracts with the health regions providing specifics on the number of procedures performed, the costs and time frame. They were also required to meet the same standards as hospitals.

“In addition to shortening wait times, the study found it also saved the government money by cutting costs.”

     Whodathunkit!

     TTFN.

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