I thought Michael Moore’s Sicko made a very compelling case for socialized medicine, though it contradicted what I thought I knew about Britain’s health care system.
So, I was very interested to hear the free market perspective on health care from Ron Paul.
Everybody agrees the current system isn’t working. Here’s an LA Times article, which echoes what Sicko demonstrated: Health insurers receive bonuses for dropping sick policyholders.
It also contradicted what I thought I knew about Britain’s health care system, and I lived in Britain and used it. I personally had an OK experience with the NHS, but that was because I was a student and didn’t pay taxes so it actually was free to me. My British friends in their 20s who are trying to pay their 40-50% taxes are not as happy with the care they receive, and everyone in the UK constantly complains about it. (Income taxes are only about 30%, but then there is 17.5% sales tax on everything you buy and thousands of pounds in council tax each year, which is property tax that everyone pays whether they own their home or not.) I’m not saying whether it’s better or worse than what we have, but they do pay for it.
It’s a basic fact that, just as with defense, America subsidizes the rest of the world’s healthcare in a way. Just as our NATO friends don’t need huge standing armies or bases around the world, other countries can have inexpensive prescriptions because the drug companies are making a profit in America. And if the drug companies don’t make profits, they simply won’t have a reason to make those drugs that save everyone’s lives. We have better (=more expensive) medical training than elsewhere, and so our doctors are paid more. In return, our universities and hospitals conduct the most cutting-edge research in the world. The woman whose husband died because he didn’t get the experimental treatment? He wouldn’t have gotten it in England or France either, because it probably wouldn’t exist there. They don’t have as much medical research going on, although of course they have some, often in collaboration with NIH research in the US.