Who Will Rescue Us From Soviet Medicine?

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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Tags: Health Care, Soviet Union

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