Why socialized medicine always leads to rationing.

Some may be thinking, "How could it not?" this article is probably not for them. There are some people who don't see why such a system has to lead to rationing. Let's take a look.

A socialized system means that huge amounts of money pour into, for the sake of simplicity let's say "the government." That is how it works in other countries and will here before long. So the money pours in ahead of time. In our case WAY ahead of time. We start paying next year and no one sees a speck of benefit until 2016. So the money is paid in and gone. Then everyone wants to get there money's worth, plus it doesn't really cost any more to get a lot of care than to get a little. That's the beginning of the problem. This is what happened in Massachusetts when they had this system inflicted on them, to England, Canada, etc. In Massachusetts the average wait to see a doctor went from one week to six weeks in a couple of months. The percentage of people satisfied with the socialized plan quickly dropped to 23%. But I digress.

So, demand goes way up for the reasons mentioned above. Somehow, government types never anticipate basic reactions of the market like this. So they panic. "The cost is doubling, tripling. Let's do something." The obvious thing is to stick it to the evil doctors and nurses. They charge too much, so won't mind having their pay cut in half. That'll teach them a lesson, and solve the problem...

As it turns out, doctors and nurses are among the types of people who don't like to be paid half as much for the same work. Doctors retire early, go into another line of work, prospective doctors leave medical school and choose something else, etc.

So now there is far more demand than before, and far less supply. This is how you get the situation like you have in Europe. You may have heard of the eight week waits to get medicines, and the 31 month waits for routine procedures and surgeries.

Don't worry. Politicians and bureaucrats can fix that too. They declare that the waits are intolerable and mandate that they stop. In England emergency room waits were running three or four DAYS before seeing a doctor. A law was made mandating that patients must be seen within four hours of walking in the door, or there will be a fine. (There, that'll teach them.) Since demand was still far too high and demand too low, take a guess what happened next.

Five hour waits in ambulances outside the doors of the emergency room. Remember, they had only four hours once they passed through the doors. Lines in the rain for endless hours if you weren't sick enough to wait in style in an ambulance.

This is one of the top one hundred failures of socialism, and why it's illogical. In a free market, how people respond to incentives and disincentives shapes goods and services to what people desire at a price they can live with. Under socialism there is no accounting for what people want, only more and more mandates that cause all kinds of weird, distorted results. There must be rationing because people are still people, even under socialism, and still respond to incentives. When people don't feel any additional cost of using the service, demand goes sky high. When wages are slashed, people do something else.

When high demand and low supply collide, there has to be a mechanism to decide who gets things. It will either be decided by age, income, loyalty to the government, how sick you are, how long you're willing to wait in the rain, or something. There has to be a mechanism for dividing up supply because it's not unlimited. Typically, in socialist systems the mechanism is rationing based on either willingness to wait hours or days, loyalty to the ruling party, or knowing the right people. We don't have that sytem here...yet. It's something to look forward to.

Here's an article that is kind of related:
www.biggovernment.com/2010/01/04/medicare-is-already-rationing-care/