By Selwyn Duke

George Mason University economics professor Walter Williams has penned another excellent article, this time about socialized medicine.  And since he relates the truth, it’s not a pretty picture.  He talks about how the health-care systems in Britain, Canada and Sweden are running on fumes, and in particular I call your attention to the following paragraph:

“OK, Williams,” you say, “Sweden is the world’s socialist wonder.” Sven R. Larson tells about some of Sweden’s problems in “Lesson from Sweden’s Universal Health System: Tales from the Health-care Crypt,” published in the Journal of American Physicians and Surgeons (Spring 2008). Mr. D., a Gothenburg multiple sclerosis patient, was prescribed a new drug. His doctor’s request was denied because the drug was 33 percent more expensive than the older medicine. Mr. D. offered to pay for the medicine himself but was prevented from doing so. The bureaucrats said it would set a bad precedent and lead to unequal access to medicine.

I believe it was Winston Churchill who noted that socialism’s one virtue is the equal spreading of misery.  And let’s examine this idea.  To damn some people to infirmity in order to avoid “unequal access to medicine” is not only wrong-headed, it’s evil.  You might as well say that it’s preferable to have all citizens die than just some, all citizens be unhappy than just some, or all citizens suffer privation than just some.  But this is how leftists think. 

Of course, it goes without saying that we’d like all people to live lives of milk and honey, but that isn’t possible.  That is something of Heaven, not this world.  Here we must do two things: Recognize the ideal and strive for it while also accepting the best we can manage at the moment.  To not accept the latter is the mark of a fool, and such a person belongs nowhere near any position of authority.  In fact, he probably belongs in a rubber room.

It’s always amazing how, in the final analysis, leftists are profoundly uncompassionate and live unexamined lives.  Those Swedish bureaucrats, those useless cogs in the machinery of the state, are damning Mr. D. to a diminished life in deference to a principle they would never live up to themselves.  If they or their loved ones were in Mr. D.’s shoes, how many would refuse the more effective medication in the name of equality?  How many commissars in the Soviet Union stood on bread lines for two hours with the common folks?  Yes, it’s very easy to be idealistic when you don’t have to live with your ideals.  Such people are the worst kind of hypocrites.  They are to be despised.

It reminds me of G.K. Chesterton’s saying about how there are really only two kinds of people, “those who accept dogmas and know it and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.”  These leftists have done the worst of things: They have elevated equality above true virtues, while lowering all virtues to a point where their practice becomes optional.  Life is not fair; it doesn’t prescribe equality.  And it is a very arrogant, ignorant person indeed who thinks he has the right to enforce secular equality doctrine at the end of a gun.  I truly have come to loathe the word “equality.”

Williams also writes:

Malmo, with its 280,000 residents, is Sweden’s third-largest city. To see a physician, a patient must go to one of two local clinics before they can see a specialist. The clinics have security guards to keep patients from getting unruly as they wait hours to see a doctor. The guards also prevent new patients from entering the clinic when the waiting room is considered full. Uppsala, a city with 200,000 people, has only one specialist in mammography. Sweden’s National Cancer Foundation reports that in a few years most Swedish women will not have access to mammography.

If you want to eliminate innovation, the development of new medication, and access to medical care and equipment, socialized medicine is the way to go.  Consider this statistic, for instance: The state of Tennessee has more MRI machines than all of Canada.  And as bad as socialized medicine is in foreign countries, it would be five times the disaster here. 

But, hey, you’ve got to die of something, right?  

                © 2008 Selwyn Duke — All Rights Reserved