It's really quite pleasant to wake up and read this:
it's true that Americans get hip replacements faster than Canadians. But there's a funny thing about that example, which is used constantly as an argument for the superiority of private health insurance over a government-run system: the large majority of hip replacements in the United States are paid for by, um, Medicare.
That's right: the hip-replacement gap is actually a comparison of two government health insurance systems. American Medicare has shorter waits than Canadian Medicare (yes, that's what they call their system) because it has more lavish funding — end of story. The alleged virtues of private insurance have nothing to do with it.
The bottom line is that the opponents of universal health care appear to have run out of honest arguments. All they have left are fantasies: horror fiction about health care in other countries, and fairy tales about health care here in America.
I've grown convinced that many conservatives actually don't understand what rationing is. They appear to consider it some sort of intrinsic quality of state-run health systems -- national health care has rationing in much the way a car has doors. It's just there.
Of course, that's not the case. A state-run system could decide, as Medicare does, that they'll pay for any and all necessary procedures, and do so quickly. Then there would be no rationing. There would be, as there is in Medicare, enormous spending and astonishingly fast cost growth. Instead, other systems, and their attendant societies, makes a judgment to devote relatively fewer resources to health care and relatively more to other things (like leisure!). That's a fair allocation of resources.
What we do in this society is devote relatively unlimited resources to health care for wealthy and insured people and relatively fewer to health care for poor people. It isn't clear whether we think that's a useful way to spend trillions of dollars, or whether we'd prefer some alternate ordering of expenditures, with more going to preventive medicine and paid maternal leave. This is largely because the political party that has tasked itself with protecting the unlimited privileges of the rich has skillfully made it taboo to discuss such things as limiting or redirecting health care expenditures through collective action, but it is, theoretically, something we could explore.
