Let’s watch the expensive failure of socialized health care
Posted by Brian… somewhere else. Like Wisconsin.
The land of cheese is on the precipice of passing a socialized health care plan for all residents under the age of 65. I guess the older folks are covered by Mother Washington. Their plan will initially result in a tax increase of $510 per month for every worker and could eat up about 20% of family incomes. But they will have a 16 person panel charged with lording over the health of an entire state.
Since Wisconsin is lucky enough to be run by progressives socialists they will impose a hefty portion of the new taxes on businesses. How nice of them! Good thing they aren’t taxing regular people. Those businesses will respond in a number of predictable ways: passing costs on to consumers (real people), depressing profits of owners (real people), or maybe simply relocating out of state (leaving real people unemployed). Those newly employed people will continue to get their free health care - which will be provided by the shrinking number of actual workers who will begin to carry an even larger tax burden. Think of it this way, the state of Wisconsin is putting every business within its borders at a nearly 15% cost disadvantage compared to businesses in other states. And you thought NAFTA was going to make a big sucking sound.
John Stossel pretty much sums up my feelings on the matter:
America needs “Healthy Wisconsin.” The fall of the Soviet Union deprived us of the biggest example of how socialism works. We need laboratories of failure to demonstrate what socialism is like. All we have now is Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea, the U.S. Post Office, and state motor-vehicle departments.
It’s not enough. Wisconsin can show the other 49 states what “universal” coverage is like.
Let’s just hop they can crash and burn before such onerous mandates get imposed on the country at large. Maybe when they encounter a financial crisis as they become a mecca for the infirmed and unemployable, lose businesses, and tax their residents to death Americans will see the folly of socialism.
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August 8th, 2007 at 8:47 am
You don’t need to look any farther than Walter Reed and Tri-Care to see shining examples of how Socialized medicine doesn’t work.
August 8th, 2007 at 6:30 pm
It should be noted that a lot of liberals question whether state’s should try to undertake this effort themselves for a variety of reasons.
August 8th, 2007 at 9:28 pm
My favorite quote:
You could replace state with national and the sentence would read the same. All of the state plans seemed to have suffered the same fate: they were too expensive to be sustainable through economic cycles. Why would we think that it would be any different at the national level where we have suffered significant ups and downs.
The root problem is reality. Even the article mentioned that one of the country’s most wealthy states, Massachusetts, is barely able to afford their latest and greatest plan. The national government can’t even broaden that same plan without taxing MA and other rich states even more to provide it to the poor states. It is expensive enough to divvy up our finite health care among those who earn it through their productivity - we can’t afford to just give it to everyone.
Oh, and kiss all those great medical advances goodbye when the government effectively implements price controls in the health sector. All those “greedy” companies out there toiling away to generate innovative products so that they can make money in a pseudo-free market will significantly curtail their research spending because the potential for return will be diminished.