obama_healthcare

In constant stupendous surprise to the government’s unfamiliarity with the law of supply and demand I endeavor to remind you, rational person. You aren’t so busy running the free world and you certainly have to foot your own bills, so I assume you are very interested in the real outcome of government-run healthcare. There are only two possibilities:

#1 – Higher Healthcare Costs

Part of the idea of the proposed healthcare bill is that it will result in more healthcare services being delivered to more people. The healthcare business likes this. Should you like this?

First, why would this happen? It’s because the people receiving the healthcare wouldn’t be directly paying for it. That results in them getting more of it. Do you eat more at a buffet than you do when ordering from an a la carte menu? Yes, because there is no direct cost to you deciding to get a few more servings of food. Removing the direct cost to healthcare will mean Americans getting a few more servings of healthcare. Inevitably, this would include unnecessary servings of healthcare.

Ask a doctor who works in the emergency room how often he or she sees patients that did not have a bona fide emergency or even a need for medical care at all, and the response will be “a lot.” This will only increase when the financial cost of medical care is even further removed from the parties to the actual care.

In short, demand for healthcare would rise, leading to a rise in costs. The last thing the government needs now is more costs. Also, Obama’s promotion of  this bill by saying it will “reduce the cost of healthcare for Americans” should raise a lot of suspicion when it’ impact is more likely to raise the cost of healthcare for Americans.

#2 – Reduced Availability of Healthcare

A cap (or reduction) of healthcare costs or spending would result in a cap (or reduction) of health care availability.

For this, we can easily look to Canada and England. Seeing a dentist in England is a later step of a bureaucratic process that starts with waiting in line behinds hundreds of people just to register for a dentist. The waits are so long that some people are pulling their own teeth at home!

Canadians who are allowed admission into hospitals are forced to wait an average of 23 hours. Over 1.7 million Canadians say they can’t even get a family doctor. Some towns hold lotteries where a couple of names are drawn out of a box each month to decide who gets to have a family doctor.

Back on the capitalism side of things, businesses have emerged that provide a much needed service for Canadians—arranging for treatment in the United States where they won’t have to wait. Such services have saved the lives of many Canadians who needed emergency treatment and would have been forced to otherwise wait to death in Canada. Perhaps the best eye opener for the state of healthcare in Canada is the superiority in some respects of healthcare for animals. A CT scan at a vet can be done tomorrow, but a CT scan for a person will take a month of waiting.

The basic law of supply and demand says that the only way to make something more readily available and cheaper is to reduce the demand for it.