Keith Devens .com

A health care thought experiment

For people who support socialized/nationalized health care:

Let's just assume for a minute that elected legislators would be able to make decisions about an industry they're by and large unfamiliar with with equal competence as those who are in the industry, that there would be no social or structural consequences to the health care industry of having added layers of bureaucracy and a monopoly instead of free-market competition, that there would be no changes in individual behavior due to the diffusion of responsibility of having "the government" pay for your medical care, and that there would be no socioeconomic consquences of much higher taxes providing a disincentive to produce, creating the vicious cycle of increasingly high taxes and increasingly low production. This allows us to consider just "the numbers", ceteris paribus.

What you have is a spectrum. All the way on the left side of the spectrum is the case where there is no illness, and the health care cost per individual is zero. All the way on the right side of the spectrum is the case where everybody has cancer and each person needs millions of dollars worth of medical treatment. Call the former 'A' and the latter 'B'. If the world was like A then the government could clearly meet all of our health care costs with no additional outlay^[1]. If the world was like B clearly the government could never provide everybody's health care.

This thought experiment is merely intended to show that it is not a foregone conclusion that it is even possible to provide every individual with the medical care he needs period, no matter who pays for it.

The real world, of course, is somewhere in between. But where? Considering that all additional outlays ideally result in a proportional increase in taxes, 'A' would require 0% of every individual's income to pay for, while 'B' would require >>100% of every individual's income. Call 'C' the point where the aggregate cost of health care is exactly equal to aggregate income (so, C is between A and B). Is the real world to the right of 'C'? Conceivably. If the real world ('R') is at 'C' or to the right, providing health care for everyone who needs it bankrupts everyone. Clearly that's a failed proposition. If the real world is to the left of 'C' somewhere, then what percentage of aggregate income must be paid to cover aggregate health care costs?

Anyway, there is more to be said, but this is fairly long already. The main point I want to get across is that it is not justified to merely assume that all medical care costs can even be met in principle. It's beyond me that people are willing to try to find out where 'R' is by creating a government-run health care monopoly to figure it out experimentally, while additionally completely failing to take into account any of the ceteris paribus stuff I outlined at the start.

Footnotes:
[1]: additional outlays in spending should be considered to correspond with an increase in taxes, even if that's not actually how things work in the real world either

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04:26 (utc-4)
edited: 04:32 (utc-4)