Public vs Private Health Care

Public healthcare, or universal healthcare as its termed is healthcare that is completely funded by the government. This means that all services are free of charge to citizens because the government pays for it using tax money. In countries that have universal healthcare, taxes usually very high both on goods and income.

This is part of what’s known as the standard of living for a country. The standard of living means that the country is clean, provides hospital care, is educated, and generally things look nice. These would be first world countries. Most people think the best way to achieve a good standard of living (affordability, jobs, education, cleanliness) is to let the government step in and take care of all of this.

And this is why most people believe universal healthcare is a good thing. Because without universal healthcare, people would not be able to afford insurance to go to the hospital and then they’d die. (Not barring the fact that in private healthcare, all doctors are legally obligated to save your life if you are dying regardless of if you have insurance or not.)

Here’s the thing, though. When the United States first started in the industrial revolution, healthcare was practically dollars per year. These people operated on a mostly free market fundamentalist system. The reason for the lowering of costs is because in a free market society, things are automatically much cheaper. Education isn’t mandatory, and university is reserved for those who can save up enough money to pay for it.

The only aid societies that existed were fraternal and friendship societies, and mutual aid organizations that helped people who were poor or needed medical insurance. Everybody else got insurance through their job, which was easily affordable, because free markets generate competition between insurance companies and employers which drives the prices for the public downward.

Then, nationalizing the Healthcare system came along.

Americans were told by the government that they were having a national healthcare crisis. Costs were too low. People got healthcare for dollars a year. Health insurance was affordable even to the poorest of families. Licensed physicians competed to get lodge practice contracts, so the competition they engaged in kept prices low all around. Doctors stopped working, medical costs started rising, and lodge practice contracts were ended.

(http://www.freenation.org/a/f12l3.html Good source explaining lodge contracts & their significance.)

Then the AMA was introduced. The hugest blow to fraternal societies and mutual aid was when the AMA was put in charge of licensing doctors. The AMA put put restrictions in licensing on doctors who engaged in lodge practice contracts and eventually eliminated lodge practice contracts altogether. They closed down hospitals and medical schools unnecessarily,

While the government imposed similar restrictions on mutual aid societies from providing charitable services as they weren’t ‘up to standard’. Things like the Mobile Law, not allowed to provide coverage for children, etc. This opened the door for industrial insurance companies. Fraternal and charitable hospitals were also taken down by the AMA for failing to meet bogus requirements like “doors that didn’t swing both ways”. Most were crushed under the impending government regulations, and currently no fraternal hospitals exist to date.

I support free markets and private healthcare quite simply because people can and do take care of themselves without government interference. The evidence has always been proven, as we did a good job without national healthcare and would do a good job now. Socialized healthcare on the other hand is a different matter.

With socialized healthcare, you are paying through your taxes. Doctors are not being paid enough because they receive a limited salary from the government, who also has to worry about providing every other resource such as equipment, and relegating other tax monies. The standard quality of care goes down immensely because of lack of funds, equipment, doctors, and an ever growing line of patients who need care.

In some places (see the Liver Pool Care pathway) they essentially have death panels to determine who is sick enough to die because there are not enough beds and resources available for everyone. It often takes hours at the emergency room to get something looked at, and if you need a specialist, you wait for months. If you need a surgery, you can wait months. This is why many people in the UK and Canada actually come to the U.S, because until recently we offered the best standard of care. Places like the Mayo Clinic? They are all completely privately funded, and they also oppose socialized medicine.

Healthcare is not a right. It is a service. It is much more of a service than flipping a burger, so I have no idea why people object to that term. Doctors spend a lot of money on their education and they do a lot of hard work making sure you stay healthy, and it is most definitely a service they should be paid for. It is the most efficient and logical way to care for large groups of human beings. So that is why I support private healthcare.