U.S. Residents Often Ignore Problems With Government-Run Health Care Systems

Main Category: Health Insurance / Medical Insurance
Also Included In: Public Health
Article Date: 08 Sep 2007 - 14:00 PDT

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The "biggest of the big lies in the health care hype is that a lack of insurance means a lack of medical care," and the "second-biggest lie is that health care and medical care are the same thing," Thomas Sowell, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, writes in a Baltimore Sun opinion piece. Sowell continues that physicians "cannot stop" people from "ruining [their] health in a hundred different ways, so statistics on everything from infant mortality and AIDS are not proof of a need for government to take over medical treatment."

He writes, "Few people show the slightest interest in what has happened in countries with government-controlled medical care," adding that "people in those countries" spend "months" on waiting lists for medical care "that Americans get just by picking up a phone and making an appointment." In addition, it is "amazing how many people seem uninterested in such things as why so many doctors in Britain are from Third World countries with lower medical standards -- or why people from Canada come to the United States for medical treatment that they could get cheaper at home," Sowell writes.

According to Sowell, "price controls on pharmaceutical drugs are more of the same illusion of something for nothing." He writes, "People who are urging us to follow other countries that control the prices of medications seem uninterested in the fact that those countries depend on the United States to create drugs, after they destroyed incentives to do so in their own countries" (Sowell, Baltimore Sun, 9/5).

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