A fundamental problem I have with socialism is the extent to which it restricts personal freedom of choice. Suppose a citizen of a country with a purely socialized health-care system becomes seriously ill. What treatment options does she have? If she happens to be wealthy enough to travel to a more free-market-oriented country for treatment, then she will have other options. But suppose she isn't wealthy. In that case she has no viable option other than to accept whatever treatment the government-imposed rationing bureaucracy is willing to provide. If the system provides her with inferior, outmoded care or puts her on a long waiting list for time-critical treatments or surgery, she simply has to accept that. She could support political reforms that would reduce the degree of rationing and/or implement a more free-market system. But as a seriously-ill person, she'd have little time or energy for that. Even assuming she were able to achieve such reforms, she could easily be dead long before they were implemented. Now suppose she lived in a country with a free-market health-care system. In that case, she'd have myriad treatment options. It's true that she'd have to pay out of pocket and/or rely on whatever insurance she happened to have. But in a truly free-market system, health-care-related prices would be dramatically lower than prices in our existing system, due to the proper functioning of competition. Even if she couldn't afford her treatments, she's still have many options. She could borrow money, ask for donations, and/or rely on non-profit, charitable medical organizations.
Now consider the freedom of choice available to someone who's career goal is to work in the health-care industry. In a purely socialized system, her only option would be to become an employee of the government. Suppose that--for whatever reason--the government wouldn't hire her, or the pay and/or working conditions didn't appeal to her. She'd be out of luck. In a free-market system, however, she'd have a vast array of choices. She could apply for a jobs with a large number of for-profit or non-profit medical organizations. Or, if she was an entrepreneurial person, she could start her own organization.
Some may believe that these kinds of restrictions on freedom are a small price to pay for achieving such goals as universal health care for everyone. Unfortunately, they are not, as anyone who's had direct experience with them can attest. The lack of personal freedom inherent in socialism constitutes an intolerable violation of our most basic individual rights. The free market is the only economic system capable of upholding our "unalienable Rights" to "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Thursday, March 4, 2010
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Seems to me that you aren't taking into account the health care of those who can't afford insurance currently. What they receive sounds just like the socialized medicine plan with which you disagree...or even worse,they have no health care at all. I think this is the issue universal health care is trying to solve. How would you change the system to be more accessible to the indigent, poverty level, or low middle income citizen?
ReplyDeleteHi Tzippi,
ReplyDeleteThe problem is that it's impossible for the government to ensure that no one is ever denied care. Our misguided attempts to do that within the context of a semi-free-market system is the primary reason that our health-care system has become a metastasizing tumor that is now threatening both our physical and our economic well-being. Purely socialized systems always implement strict rationing--a form of denial of care--while simultaneously destroying the quality and quantity of available care through elimination of market-based incentives. A free-market system is the only viable means of providing the best quality of care to the highest percentage of the population. Implementing such a system would dramatically improve quality and reduce prices, making health care and health insurance affordable even for most low-income people, just as it has done for virtually every other necessity in this country, including housing, clothing, food, and transportation. Those few people who couldn't afford health care would still be able to resort to friends, family, loans, and/or charitable organizations.