“Do we want the government employees who run the troubled Walter Reed Army Medical Center to be in charge of our entire health care system? Or, would you like the people who deliver our mail to also deliver health care services? How would you like the people who run the motor vehicles department, the government education system, foreign intelligence and other government agencies to also run our health care system? After all, they are not motivated by the quest for profits, and that might mean they’re truly wonderful, selfless, caring people.” –Walter Williams
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- Quote Of The Day 5/8/2013
- Quote Of The Day 3/11/2013
- Quote Of The Day 2/21/2013
- Quote Of The Day 1/18/2013
- The Scamming Beggar 12/1/2012
Do we want the corrupt fat-cat business executives that bankrupted Savings and Loan institutions in the 1990′s to be in charge of our entire health care system? Or, would you like the people who sell you a used car to deliver health care services? How would you like the people who bankrupted American Airlines, mismanaged Enron, and directed unscrupulous and near-sighted mortgage loan companies to also run our health care system? After all, they’re not cold, unfeeling government entities, and that might mean they’re truly wonderful, selfless, caring people.
This has been another edition of “Over-reaching, Deeply Flawed Arguments for Government Policy”. Thanks for joining us.
Granted – no side is perfect. But I would still choose the free market over the government. You can count free market failures (relatively speaking) with one hand – government failures, on the other hand, have plagued the world since the beginning of government itself.
Great Idea to let the Government run the health care system “Under Democrat Control”.
I think it’s great; Think about it for a moment?
Under Democrat control over the States the democrats have actually cut health care for the poor.
Now what are you thinking that the democrats are going to do with more powers over our own health care dollars?
There are excellent arguments to be made both in favor of, and against, universal health care. The argument made by Williams, however, is not one of those.
Williams is saying “There are abundant cases of government failures, so public management of health care is likely to also be a failure.”
That’s true, but it’s no more true than a counter argument that states “There are abundant cases of free-market failures, so private management of health care is likely to also be a failure.”
It’s a useless argument.
It makes no attempt to address the quality of the healthcare, the public good, the cost, the level of coverage, or any other of the myriad of important factors that should be considered. In a word, it’s silly.
When private enterprise does too badly, it goes out of business – no one wants do do business with it. Customers, employees, financial institutions all find better places to do business.
When government does too badly, it pleads for and usually gets more funding to continue doing badly.
True_Liberal,
All generally true. As a general rule, any fair-minded person will accept that a true free-market hospital (which, strictly speaking, don’t currently exist) would work more efficiently than a government-run hospital, for example.
But are you willing to accept the downside of that equation? If the free-market hospital administrator in some small town in Nebraska mismanages his enterprise so badly that it fails, are you willing to accept the fact that the residents of the town pay the price as they ?
Or, let’s suppose the hospital director makes a perfectly correct business decision, such as: “The gigantic price tag of a helipad, helicoper, pilot and EMT on constant standby for emergency flight operations is nowhere near cost-efficient”. Are you ok with that?
If the town fathers want to subsidize those operations that don’t make good business sense for a private hospital, that’s perfectly OK with me – That’s an area where one town sees the risks of having/not having the service differently than another town 75 miles away. It might be aerial ambulance, or a cardiac unit, or oncology…
But that’s essentially a local decision, is it not? No one forces you to live in a community without a major hospital nearby. A federal mandate or subsidy won’t make healthcare a bit cheaper, nor even guarantee better outcomes. Ever read the accident statistics for medical helicopter operations?
And so let’s assume that your preferred system is in place and one city has decided to tax their citizens to foot the bill for an emergency medical flight team, and the other has not. Which city would you prefer to live in? I’ll take the second one, thank you.
Assuming you would prefer to live in the first city, then perhaps it is fair to conclude that the difference between us is that one of us (me) places a slightly higher value on the quality of health care, and the other (you) places a slightly higher value on the cost of health care. Does that sound fair?
Same thing happens in education, does it not?
It’s a local choice – one size does NOT fit all. There is no reason to force all such facilities into the same mold. One town may have a central hospital, the next may have several small clinics. Which works best? Only time will tell.