Socialized medicine is built on the same flawed foundation that all of socialism is based on. It all comes down to one nasty little word: rationing. With economic socialism, you start with the assumption that there is not enough money to go around, so we leave it up to the government to determine who is worthy of getting the money that rightly belongs to other people. With socialized medicine, it’s the same thing, only with healthcare. You start with the presumption that there’s not enough medicine to go around, then you let the government decide who lives and who dies. Italy tried the socialized approach to rationing COVID-19 treatment, and it quickly proved to be a miserable failure.
Even though socialized medicine claims to level the playing field when it comes to poor people receiving care, the rich still come out on top. If you are a Hollywood actor, you can afford to receive better treatment at home and no one will interfere with prescriptions by your physician. You can pay outrageous amounts of money to doctors good enough to be able to charge outrageous amounts of money. That’s just how economics works, even with socialism. Daniel Dae Kim, an actor on “Lost” and “Hawaii Five-0,” received specialized in-home care for his recovery from COVID-19, and he was quick to talk about it on social media.
I’m not saying that the free market will allow everyone to get the same treatment as Hollywood celebrities, but I do know spending the last moments of your life in a warehouse of hospital beds is not what any patient wants. The goal should be to keep people out of hospitals, not to wait until patients fill hospital beds before treating them. The beauty of the free market system is that it takes decisions out of the hands of government and gives that power back to people.
The real crisis is political, not medical. There’s no reason to let America’s love of freedom end at the door to your doctor’s office. Socialized medicine is no cure to the ills faced by the We the People.
