I’m not sure why the calls for universal health care are getting louder and louder in the face of facts which clearly show that socialized systems that are already in place around the world just do not work. Socialized medicine violates the rights of individuals to make choices about their health care.
Government intervention into the health care system has dramatically increased costs associated with care by giving special favors to companies like Blue Cross/Blue Shield, controlling and mandating insurance coverage for supplemental health care (i.e. chiropractic services), subsidizing the cost of health insurance through tax favors and Government programs like Medicaid and Medicare, Government mandated price fixing and abandonment of sound insurance risk management through community rating, and by denying access to potentially life-saving drugs through the Food & Drug Administration.
Healthcare Is Not A Right:
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_________________________This entry was posted on January 13th, 2012 by David C Lewis, RFC. Edits may have been made to keep this entry current. · 2 Comments · Current Events, Insurance & Savings, Philosophy In Financial Planning
> “I’m not sure why the calls for universal health care are getting louder and louder in the face of facts which clearly show that socialized systems that are already in place around the world just do not work.”
Perhaps the answer–as I suspect you already know–is that workability over the long-run is not the guiding principle. Egalitarianism, parasitism, envy, and wishful thinking are my candidates for most common guiding principles held by intellectually articulate advocates of monopoly medicine (“universal healthcare”).
Coincidentally, I have been rereading Leonard Peikoff’s book, Ominous Parallels. On p. 337 he observes:
“Historically, capitalism worked brilliantly, and it is the only system that will work. Socialism in every variant has led to disaster and will again whever it is tried. Yet socialism is admired by mankind’s teachers, while capitalism is damned. The source of this inversion is the fact that freedom is selfish, rights are selfish, capitalism is selfish.”
Thus, only the birth of the virtue of selfishness will end socialism in general and socialized medicine in particular.
P. S. — The Ominous Parallels will be the subject of a study group on Study Groups for Objectivists in the spring of 2009: http://www.studygroupsforobjectivists.com