Under a socialized system, a patient with a life-threatening cancer will be placed on a waiting list – possibly many years long – for even an elementary diagnosis, because the government has prioritized its money over his life. This prioritization is not due to the malice of government officials; rather, it is an economic necessity given the incentives created by socialized medicine. After all, there are plenty of other people with life-threatening illnesses, who may already have waited for years to get treatment, and the government only has so much money it can spend. As the government is a monopoly provider of healthcare, patients have no other recourse but to keep waiting – even if they could afford to pay the full cost of private treatment. Many Canadian patients currently use the still partially private American health care system as a safety valve in such instances. But if the United States government foolishly nationalizes healthcare, this safety valve will be gone, and both countries’ healthcare systems will lapse into a state of dire crisis.

          Contrast this dismal state of affairs to what would happen in a fully private system. A patient with cancer can immediately get diagnosis and treatment from one of a vast multitude of for-profit healthcare providers if he can afford to pay. Indeed, services will tend to spring up specifically to accommodate the demand of patients like him. If he cannot afford to pay, he can still benefit from the generosity of many private charities and price-discriminating doctors. Furthermore, in a private system, the rate of medical progress is tremendously high, leading to increasingly effective treatments and cures for life-threatening diseases. In a socialized system, there is no incentive for individuals to innovate; indeed, highly bureaucratized government healthcare greatly discourages innovation, seeing it as initially costly and wasteful and failing to recognize its long-term benefits. After all, new drugs and treatment methods have a high initial likelihood of failure – and an already strained socialized healthcare system will be highly resistant to bearing those costs. But in a free market, private individuals can choose to personally bear the risk of their innovations failing; they will only choose to do this, however, if they are assured that they can profit if their innovations succeed.

          In a private healthcare system, at least some of the decentralized market actors will find a way to save individuals’ lives at costs that those individuals can afford. With government healthcare, however, an inevitable tradeoff between money and lives exists. Only where genuine consumer choice is possible can such a tradeoff be eliminated.

 

* This article was originally published on GrasstopsUSA.com.