Just because the Soviet Union collapsed under its own weight does not mean that the dream of a socialist Utopia has died. As Winston Churchill once said, the inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of its blessings, the virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of its miseries.

Universal health care ideas are appealing in the way that every Utopian dream is, but they have never worked out as dreamed. Various states in the U.S. have tried various schemes, and each one has lead to higher costs, less choice, fleeing physicians, exploding budgets, more uninsured people and ultimately a quiet abandonment or severe cut-back of the program. (Just last week, I read that Hawaii has abandoned its univesal child health care coverage.) Here’s a good summary of what has happened to the various state programs: http://www.washingtonpolicy.org/Centers/healthcare/policybrief/StateHealthCareReforms.pdf

The countries that hava socialized medicine suffer from a “brain drain” of the top physicians, a lack of medical innovation (easily measurable by issued patents), swelling health care budgets and constant problems with unacceptable wait times, quotas on medical care and huge inconveniences for the health care consumer. When those inconveniences are in waiting time for treatment, they include pain, disability and death. Polling data show that 30% of Canadians are dissatisfied with the health care they themselves receive, compared to only 10% of Americans who are dissatisfied with their own health care. Canadians may be more happy with their “system” in theory, but in practice, they don’t like how it affects them directly. Because it’s simply not as good.

When my sister’s U.S. doctor found a lesion on her lung during a routine chest X-ray, it took about 10 days to get a CT scan of it, consult with the pulmonologist, the oncologist and the surgeon, and have her lung cancer surgery. In Canada, just the wait for access to the the few CT machines would have been several weeks longer, and after that, they’ve been struggling for the last 10 years to bring the wait time in lung cancer cases down to eight weeks from the first visit to the specialist to the surgery. My sister is alive 11 years later. Like David, she paid about $10,000 above her private insurance coverage and maybe above what it would have cost her in Canada.

Maybe she would have survived in Canada too, but maybe those months of waiting would have meant a metastisis to the brain, bones or elsewhere, and three children left without their mother at a young age. And what is the “cost” of weeks of waiting for treatment, knowing that all the while a fatal disease is progressing within you unchecked?

Is it really better to have your life at the mercy of a government bureaucrat with virtually guaranteed life-time employment, than to have your check-book at the mercy of an insurance executive who has to worry every day about balancing enrollments with profits? Neither is an attractive prospect, but if you don’t like how the feds handled Katrina or the mortgage industry, why would you entrust your life to them to save some money?

Our health care system in the US treats the poor and unissured the way that countries with socialized medicine treat everybody. If you believe that an equal sharing of the misery is better than an unequal sharing of the blessings, that is a straightforward choice of values, and I can respect it, but from everything I’ve read, it would be a deception to pretend that most people’s health care in the U.S. would be improved by socialized medicine. It would not be; it will worsen.

And because American medicine has been for the last 30 years or more the engine of innovation and discovery for the whole world, over time, not only Americans’ health care will decline, but so will the rest of the world’s.

But the Utopian dreamers who stifle innovation will escape the blame that should be theirs, because the medicines and techniques that won’t be invented, the lives that would have been saved, the pain and disability that would have been alleviated, will simply never be known.

The reason some people, like me, resist socialism is not because of some left-over fear of a communist bogey-man, but because it always reduces human freedom and over the long-run, increases human suffering, including the economic suffering it most claims to alleviate. The reasons why this noble dream simply doesn’t work out were spelled out clearly back in the 1944 book by Nobel Prize winner Frederich Hayek, called “The Road to Serfdom.” In the years since then, Hayek’s predictive accuracy has proven strong enough that even socialists these days generally know better than to openly advocate for socialism, preferring to call it by euphemisms like “social justice” and “universal health care.”

I already find it necessary to pay private school tuition to educate my children because of the incompetence of the public school educational system, for which I must also pay through my taxes. When they get that right, and can cope adequately with national emergencies like Katrina and 9/11 and the mortgage industry collapse, I’ll give some more thought to whether I want my health care turned over to them as well. For now, though, I can’t think of anything I’d like worse.

Granted, if someone is lucky enough to be the picture of perfect health, or go directly from their parent’s nurturing care (and full-coverage insurance) to a high-paying job with great benefits, then they probably are a little out of touch with how inadequate our healthcare system is (Joshua).

P.S. Nuder, you rock, almost as much as KV does. Best quote ever.

-kurt.vonnegut-

Seriously:

1) I don’t understand the fear of “socialism”. Didn’t all that fear of the Reds die with the collapse of communism? Isn’t it time for a more sophisticated understanding of the world? We’re right over the border here in Canada. Come for a visit. I promise I won’t be wearing a furry hat and drinking vodka – not that there’s anything wrong with that.

2) What *are* you paying for? From what I understand, even if you’re able to pay for insurance, you get the privilege to pay more and more and more.

3) Responsibilities. What should your government be responsible for? Clearly your government has some sort of responsibility for education, policing, fire, highways/roads, potable water and other services. I’m not hearing much debate over whether you should have to directly pay a fireman before he puts out the fire to your house.

So why shouldn’t the physical health of an American citizen be covered? Doesn’t it benefit your economy to have healthy productive citizens?