Dan at Gay Patriot has an interesting post on how Ted Kennedy saved a girl from the Soviet medical system, which could not treat her disease. Fair enough, Teddy saved a girl (I’m resisting the urge to mention …. well you know).
I am familiar with the Soviet medical system, at least as it existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when I studied in Moscow. There was free and universal medical care for all. But the care sucked (that’s a Russian medical term).
Doctors were held in low esteem, and there was a flourishing black market in private medical care for the same reasons there was a flourishing black market in just about everything. Central planning doesn’t work, whether it’s in medicine or anything else. What don’t you understand about the failure of communism?
So, getting back to Ted, good deed done. But that misses the point.
When we beat the profit motive out of medicine so that the best and brightest go into other professions; when we homogenize care to the lowest common denominator; when we create planned shortages; when we demean doctors as people who only want their patients to get unnecessary surgeries; when politicians play doctor (red pill or blue pill?); when we have re-created the Soviet medical system in the name of equality and fairness …
Where do we go?
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Throwing Darts at HR3200 – Day 2 (Enhanced Penalties)
Throwing Darts At HR3200 – Day 1
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Comments
That is an excellent point. The USA has treatments for cancer that are not to be found anywhere else. There are families that have raised the funds to take their children to New York for treatment because that treatment was not available in Australia…..
What will happen when all of this is rationed?
Great post! I have a reader at my blog that actually thinks that our health care system is sick because there is a profit motive involved. He says that to remove that motive is the only way to fix the system. I don't even know where to start to counter that thinking!
Of course, profits are horrible. Without profit, things would be so much cheaper. Or, maybe not.
I once met a person who blamed the bakery for selling her a cake. You see, thay made a profit off of her.
They Are Profiting From My Needs