The Real Face of Socialized Medicine

This post was originally published on this site

There is a significant constituency for socialized medicine in the United States, and it seems like every progressive will tell you why it is perfectly understandable that one of their own would decide to shoot a health insurance CEO in the back. 

After all, there are people who are not getting exactly what they want at the exact time they want it. 

I’m not naive enough to think that our healthcare system is perfect–it is, in fact, a convoluted mess slapped together over the past 75 years and in desperate need of reform. I’m not even sure how we could get from here to a rationally designed system that combines free-market principles and affordable insurance, given how screwed up things are. 

But be careful what you wish for, commies, because socialized medicine is in almost all ways much worse. 

Woman waits 6 years for knee replacement. Gets surgery but has complication. Has to wait 8 days for follow-up procedure because there are no beds. Because of delay, she now needs amputation.

Can we stop defending Canada’s atrocious healthcare system?https://t.co/fgbbpzumei

— Robyn Urback (@RobynUrback) December 17, 2024

Ask any Brit what they think of the National Health Service, and they will give you a long list of horror stories, but then robotically intone their love of the NHS as an idea. They are quite proud of it as an idea, but the reality of it is almost unbearable. Few Americans would tolerate what is quite normal in Great Britain. 

Canada, though, is arguably worse since their solution to limited resources is to offer to murder you, or in this case, to chop your limbs off once they torture you with poor care. 

The story of Roseanne Milburn is bad enough to make you burn with rage, but it is not shocking at all in the context of how Canada rations care. In the US, we are used to having access to almost unlimited resources dedicated to providing healthcare, and that is one of the reasons why we are so shocked when anything is denied. Everything is expensive, pricing is opaque, insurance companies are maddening to deal with, but when push comes to shove we tend to get the care we need (or more) when we need it. 

My wife, for instance, had pain in her hip and got it checked out. The doctor said she should get her hip replaced, although she could do it now or wait until it got worse. It was up to her. She decided to go for the replacement, got a newer procedure that was minimally invasive within a few weeks and was back on her feet almost immediately. 

Smooth as silk, for the most part. We had a deductible, of course, but we always met it, and more, so the procedure cost us, net, almost nothing. 

In Canada Ms. Milburn needed a knee replaced, and she was placed on a waiting list. Six years later, she got it, but it didn’t go so well. Today, she is down one leg. 

A Manitoba woman had her right leg amputated after complications following a knee replacement surgery two months earlier.

Roseanne Milburn, 61, went ahead with the scheduled amputation last Friday, after weeks of complications stemming from a post-surgery infection.

In late November, a surgeon at Winnipeg’s Health Sciences Centre began removing dead tissue from her right knee, with the intention of stitching her up later that day after she was seen by an orthopedic surgeon at Concordia Hospital.

She was sent to Concordia, but couldn’t be transferred back to HSC because there wasn’t a bed available for the specialist to finish the procedure. Instead, she spent eight days languishing at Concordia with a painful open wound.

Manitoba woman set to lose right leg after languishing in hospital bed with open wound

Once she finally got to HSC, Milburn went under the knife for another infection, but due to the long delay in stitching up the wound, she said she was told her leg wasn’t salvageable.

Eight days with an open wound. Eight days. So long that the leg became necrotic and had to be removed. 

At least she got the amputation at the cut-rate or for free. 

The fact is that every good we consume is a limited resource, including healthcare. It gets rationed somehow, and under socialized systems, the rationing mechanism isn’t price but time and quality. Nothing is for free. 

With all the problems with our healthcare system in the United States, we have one big saving grace: the country is extremely wealthy because we have a (mostly) free market economy. That allows us to afford to consume enormous amounts of medical care, even though that care is provided extremely inefficiently. The system is lubricated by enormous amounts of money. We spend 17% of our enormous GDP on healthcare, and even under Joe Biden, our GDP is growing faster than our peer economies by a mile. 

In fact, one of the reasons why our healthcare is so expensive is that we essentially subsidize the rest of the world–we fund the innovation through high prices, while other countries buy the pharmaceuticals and medical devices at cut rates. 

Rube Goldberg couldn’t have designed a system as ridiculous as ours, but for all its flaws, it works pretty well. Despite our uncompetitive health statistics (many of these are not comparing apples to apples, but that is another issue), the fact is that almost every metric where we underperform other countries comes down to lifestyle choices, not the failure of medical care. 

For instance, the United States has one of the highest incidence rates of cancer in the world but one of the best survival rates as well. The first is likely due to higher diagnosis rates and poor lifestyle choices, and the latter is due to excellent treatment. 

In other words, we give ourselves more disease, and medical care helps us survive despite that fact. 

The truth is that Americans would go crazy dealing with most systems of socialized medicine in most countries. There may be a country or two where government-provided healthcare works for idiosyncratic reasons (I am not a healthcare public policy expert), but peer countries look pretty bad once you dig into the data. 

In the modern world, you couldn’t design a 100% private healthcare system that would pass political muster, but Singapore has a system that is mostly free-market and is top of the pile on health outcomes. 

I don’t know enough about it to endorse that system, and even if it were ideal, I see no way to get from here to there in my lifetime. 

But the evidence is clear: the socialized systems that lefties drool over are disasters.