An individual must study for about fifteen years to become an MD. He pays for his education or, perhaps, goes in debt to receive it. He studies and labors valiantly year after year to gain the skills needed, to locate a position where he can sell his services in order to feed a family and pay off educational debts.
Such an individual has a “right” to sell his services, not to give them away because someone else has a “right” to claim them free of charge. Does a “right” to free health care give one the right to force a doctor to serve him on a pro bono basis? According to Senator Sanders, doctors and all the other providers of health care will still be able to sell their services to the government after their industry has become nationalized. Then the government will determine all the prices charged for every health care transaction and also each individual who will receive any given health care service. The government bureaucracy will determine everything.
Dr. Sanders, of course, says “Free health care means only that it’s free at the point of receiving the service.” Of course it will be paid for by the government, which means that taxpayers will have to pay for everyone’s health care. We will no longer be able to arrange our own services through our own doctor for procedures of our own choosing. Those medical procedures will not be financed by our private health insurance, or according to our ability to pay for such services.
Socialist health care will be affordable, we are told by Dr. Sanders, because health care customers will no longer have to pay for insurance contracts or deductibles. We will only have to pay our taxes, which will be quite low, since tax revenues from billionaires will pay for all medical services.
The only problem is whether a few billionaires could actually pay for all healthcare for millions of Americans. Let us assume that we tax away the entire incomes of all billionaires, all millionaires, and everybody who makes $600,000 a year or more. Assume they will not merely pay some generous portion of their large incomes, but their entire incomes – every penny of what they take in during the tax year. That total would not come close to the cost estimates for “Medicare for all.” These wealthy folks do not begin to receive enough income to pay for the $23 trillion estimate for the medical costs involved for ten years of socialist healthcare. (For more detail, see the my other blogs on AOC finance.)
So a lot more tax will be involved than Dr. Sanders wishes to reveal. Many more of us will find that our tax bill for “Medicare for all” will be substantially higher than we currently pay. The gracious bureaucracy will, as bureaucracies always do in socialist healthcare programs, spare us by making every effort to hold down the mushrooming healthcare costs. They will limit what doctors can earn with price freezes, driving many young doctors and would-be medical students away from the practice of medicine and older doctors into early retirement. This will mean an increase in medical costs as the demand for “free” services seeks to expand without restraint and the supply of services shrinks in the face of controlled, minimal prices. With the increasing shortage of services, they will be rationed. That means that we will have to wait in the public queue for healthcare for some time before receiving the more limited services available.
Break an arm in March, get it set in September. Friends of mine moving back to the United States from Canada related to me the case of a friend who, to the horror of my friends and their Canadian acquaintance, had this exact experience. It’s why Canadians who can afford genuine health care come south to the United States and willingly pay for their own health care). Get diagnosed with cancer in May and begin radiation treatments 14 months later. This is the standard experience of socialized medicine.
Bernie, like other socialists, will never explain In advance how they hope to avoid the health care problems of socialism. They merely assume that we have a “right” to free stuff, without understanding the simple economics which demonstrate the folly of their ideology. They don’t learn economics, they simply learn ideology. That’s why the beautiful country of Venezuela decided that socialism was the way for them to achieve paradisaical glory. They implemented the socialist ideology only to reap shortages, the resultant increasing governmental controls that are the quick first step to tyranny, the perverse incentives of “free stuff” and the declining production inevitably a part of socialism, the implementation of militarization to manage a dissatisfied and increasingly dysfunctional social order, and the ultimate results we have observed coming from Caracas – hyperinflation, social dissent and the militarization to counter it, extreme want, and violence.
Bernie Sanders is not inclined to explain just what is implied in his saying that “Democratic socialism means we have an economy that works for all, not just for the very wealthy.” He receives cheers and whistles from his campaign audiences for a vague and sweeping statement like: Under Democratic Socialism “the rich and the powerful don’t get to call all the shots when it comes to the economy.” He offers no explanation as to how the rich and powerful owners – to be explicit, those who have through their 401K invested in firms which they and other stockholders own – will be forced to give up the rights of private property so that a socialist community can help “call the shots” of corporate America.
Bernie himself will probably continue to deny that his plans would put us on the path to Venezuelan economic life. But a recent Wall Street Journal Editorial (“All Bernie’s Socialists”) of April 9, 2018, reviewed published statements of four of his leading campaign aides and speechwriters. These Sanders socialists made it clear that they not only admire the Chavez/Madura creation of Venezuela’s socialist model, “by their own words, they want America to emulate it” (Page A16). Theirs is an aspiration for full-on nationalization and income redistribution, i.e., for Stalinist-style central economic planning and organization.
