Universal Health Care - Shooting Coyotes

I coined the phrase "shooting coyotes" in a recent blog on minimum wage (click here). You can go to that post to learn the analogy, but the short version is that some of the social trends we buy into out of a sense of social justice end up doing more harm than good in the long run.

As we build up our strength for what promises to be a tiresome presidential run (and already is in many respects), we will be hearing quite about about the need for universal health care. While the idea sounds nice on paper (as might a blueprint for socialism), it is quite disasterous in real life (as was socialism).

Almost anytime we override the free market and let government step into to direct things, we can expect the result to be dismal. Remember, some of the scariest words one can hear in a time of trouble are these: "We're from the government, and we're here to help."

Many, including religious leaders, support such plans out of a sense of social justice, but just as shooting coyotes makes the problem worse, a socialized form of health care would only harm those who are already struggling to make ends meet.

There are some primary reasons for this, which can be seen concretely in areas, such as Canada and Britain, where the experiment has been tried.

Government run health care will result in:

1. Dangerously long waits (such as waiting months for an operation to remove a threatening cancer)
2. Rationed and inferior drugs (they may seem cheap online, but many in Canada have to shop South to get the quality stuff)
3. Substandard care (if we remove the carrot from the stick by price controls, quality doctors leave the practice and new technologies and practices are discouraged)

I can't recommend more highly that, as we prepare for the election rhetoric, those wishing to be informed voters get hold of a good book on basic economics (and buy a copy for a friend). My recommendation is Basic Economics: A Citizen's Guide to the Economy by William Sowell.