Another Fairly Insane Cross-National Health Care Comparison

Yesterday, countless newspapers published a really disappointing story by Noam Levey that the Los Angeles Times ran under this title:

Global push to guarantee health coverage leaves U.S. behind; China, Mexico and other countries far less affluent are working to provide medical insurance for all citizens. It's viewed as an economic investment.

The article is little more than a puff piece for the hotly contested idea of universal coverage. It gives zero space to the competing strain of thought that the less the government does for the poor, the sick, and the vulnerable, the better off they will be.

It also doesn't consider that as spending on welfare and healthcare levels increases, yet the standard of living for the lower classes consistently decreases. Houston, we have a problem. 

It quotes "Dr. Julio Frenk, a former health minister in Mexico and dean of the Harvard School of Public Health" as saying, "As countries advance, they are realizing that creating universal healthcare systems is a necessity for long-term economic development." A necessity? Gosh. It's a wonder the United States ever became the world's largest economy.

Not that consuming more than producing is grounds for considering an economy great. 

It speaks of such government guarantees as being popular, when what it really means to say is that people are dependent on the government for their health care and frightened to death that someone might take it away.

Not that we would miss much, other than poor service, high costs, and long waits. Maybe if we looked at those socialist-like nations who have championed socialized healthcare we might see that removing it from the free market has negative results on efficiencies and costs. 

It laments the fact that the United States is an "outlier" because it fails to guarantee access to health care for all citizens, which "stands in stark contrast to America's historic leadership in education…Long before most European countries, the United States ensured access to public schooling." Yet it makes no mention of how U.S. students fare poorly in comparison to those in other advanced countries.

And public education (free and compulsory) is just as inefficient and wasteful. More spending results in lower returns on investment. 

It devotes no time to the costs of such guarantees, other than to say that they are sometimes "more than twice what was expected." But don't worry, those costs are borne by the government. It does not say where governments get all that money. I guess we'll never know.

The government does not exist. It consists of people like us. Those costs are passed on to taxpayers and those who participate in markets. The state does not take care of any costs without first taking resources from the public. 

Speaking of taxes, it makes no mention of how taxes suppress economic development. Evidently, unlike other taxes, those that support government-run health care systems do not incur the deadweight loss of taxation.

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