The non-thinking of many highly educated people is sobering.
Case in point: The Wall Street Journal ran a letter to the editor yesterday, written by a physician from Berkeley, Calif., who spoke of the efficiencies and wonders of a single-payer system for medical care in the United States.
Gee, imagine that: Someone from Berkeley advocates socialism, which is what single-payer is, but by a different name.
As with other advocates of single-payer medical care, the physician apparently hasn’t given much thought to where his thinking, or lack thereof, logically leads. If single-payer is the best system for providing a scarce good like medical care, then logically, single-payer also would be the best system for such scarce goods as food, shelter, clothing, and transportation.
Oh, wait, socializing the necessities of life and other goods has been tried already, with disastrous results.
Another letter writer in the same WSJ edition spoke of the efficiencies of the Swedish healthcare system. Unsurprisingly, the writer hails from San Francisco, where public schools apparently don’t teach that Sweden is markedly different from the USA in size, history, culture, racial make-up, and rates of violence and auto accidents. Or maybe the writer knows this and wants the USA to become like Sweden by deporting non-whites until the nation’s population is 98% white.
Granted, medical care/insurance is different in some important ways from other scarce goods. People use food, shelter, clothing, and transportation every day, and they use these goods fairly consistently throughout their lives. But they don’t use medical care every day, and they use far less of it when young than when old. Given human nature, then, many people will not save for medical care/insurance, because the need for medical care isn’t as immediate and consistent, as, let’s say, the need or desire for eating breakfast, wearing clothes, and owning status symbols like expensive cars and phones.
However, there are other ways than socialism, er, single-payer, to solve this problem of the distant need for medical care, but that requires the kind of economic thinking that doesn’t seem to be taught in medical school.
Paradoxically, because it is used less frequently but can be costly when used, medical care leaves the false impression with the public that it is more expensive in total than other goods. But medical expenditures aren’t really higher than other major household expenditures, on average. In fact, total household spending on medical care ranks lower than spending on housing, cars, and taxes.
Not surprisingly, there is no hue and cry in Berkeley about the high cost of taxes for working stiffs.
For sure, a catastrophic illness or injury can bankrupt a family, but so can a catastrophic auto accident or house fire. That’s why people take out insurance on their homes and cars. And because such insurance covers catastrophes and not incidentals, the premiums are lower than the premiums for medical insurance. It also helps that there is a true consumer market for homeowner and auto insurance, unlike the half-socialist system that exists today for medical insurance.
On a related note, the costs of auto accidents are staggering. There are over five million traffic accidents per year, resulting in nearly 33,000 deaths and approximately two million injuries. The average bodily injury claim alone is over $15,000.
It’s noteworthy that these bodily-injury claims are included in statistics on what Americans spend on medical care, although much of the costs are paid by auto insurance. A good gauge of the amount of money involved is the number of commercials on TV for trial-lawyer hucksters who specialize in auto accidents. The hucksters take a third of what typically would have been paid in insurance settlements anyway without their involvement, and they prey primarily on poorer people. Yet you won’t see an expose on this industry in America’s stupid and lazy media or attacks on the industry by Berkeley and San Francisco leftists.
There I go again, thinking too much. This explains why I never went to medical school. If I could live my life over again, I’d learn to memorize and regurgitate instead of think. That way, I could be a wealthy physician living in Berkeley and swallowing popular canards, tropes, and nostrums about single-payer.
