Soon, they shall throw out your infants to die on the street.....

[JollyRoger]

OK. In which direction has the system been moving for the last 80 years?

The last 80 year period has been marked by a great increase in standard of living here.

 

[ParkCungHee]

I'm very intrigued by this linear, deteministic model of politics. Mainly because I'm curious to know: If moving to the 'left' brings us to communism and moving to the 'right' brings us to libertarianism, and all politics conforms to this, do we have to go through Tannistry when moving towards communism or libertarianism? What about Legitimism? Jacobitism?

 

[Lone Wolf]

I'll look in my crystal ball to see what will become of America after the next 100 years...



Oh! What do I see, to my shock and horror! The streets are filled with dead bodies of people whom the government "health care" bureaucracy heartlessly threw out on the streets to make the statistics look better (and the government-owned street-cleaning service is too ineffective to remove the bodies)! Everyone lives in same 1-storey government constructed houses, because anything else would violate the principles of "equality"! At age of 60 everyone is mandatory shot, because he is "no longer useful to society"! Oh! Oh! Oh!

 

[Leonel]

We think we've come so far. Torture of heretics, burning of witches, it's all ancient history. And then, before you can blink an eye, suddenly it threatens to start all over again... Villains who twirl their mustaches are easy to spot. Those who clothe themselves in good deeds are well-camouflaged. People like the OP will always be with us, waiting for the right climate in which to flourish. Spreading fear in the name of righteousness. Vigilance. That is the price we have to continually pay.

 

[bathsheba666]

Should we ascribe the thread to non-socialised education systems?

 

[Yared]

Nothing like that happens in my country. Sure, it's not perfect, but it'd be a terrible shame to judge Socialised Healthcare by how it was done in the Soviet Union.

I thought you were an excellent poster and then you post this crap
-

Almost unrelated to the thread:

 

[Ayatollah So]

It's how we ensure our healthcare record remains significantly better than that of the US in every way

You Brits like to think it's your health care system, but we all know it's that healthy British diet that's really responsible for your longevity. Yeah, that must be it.

 

[innonimatu]

and what about those 30 odd developed nations where the evil "socialized medicine" is better than what the US has and nothing like that happens? Why don't we emulate them instead of the Soviets?

Not only that, the russian author of the quoted garbage is a well-known liar about the USSR, and one of the people responsible, in the quality of adviser to Gorbachev, for the proven fact which was the collapse of living standards (health care, infant mortality, life expectancy, etc, included) in post-soviet Russia. But is it necessary to say that of someone who works for the "Mises Institute"? And I'm not commenting any further on this troll thread.

 

[Ayn Rand]

The sources in the OP possess no proven fact or analysis. There is a case against socialised medicine, but it deserves a scientific, rational presentation in the context of a balanced argument. The OP contributes nothing of substance to the debate over socialised vs free-market healthcare solutions - it neither demonstrates with any proof that socialised solutions don't work, nor does it do any justice to the free-market position.

 

[Neonanocyborgasm]

Two interesting articles about the inevitable effects socialised healthcare shall have on the US healthcare system:

This has been posted before, and it's amusing to see it again.

I must ask you, aneeshm, why do you care so much for the US medical system when you live in India? At least if you want to criticize, cite something that is not obvious right-wing propaganda.

In any case, in answer to the article, it is obvious distorted political fearmongering. In fact, the first sentence is not even accurate. "In 1918, the Soviet Union became the first country to promise universal "cradle-to-grave" healthcare coverage, to be accomplished through the complete socialization of medicine." The first universal healthcare system was actually enacted in Germany in 1883. So immediately I have lost respect not only for the article, but for the author, for he is deliberately propagating falsehoods.

Another:

"The proclaimed advantages of this system were that it would "reduce costs" and eliminate the "waste" that stemmed from "unnecessary duplication and parallelism" — i.e., competition."

There were no proclamations of advantage. The Soviet Union simply took over as a totalitarian state and enacted whatever it wanted without recourse to explanation. This is obviously written to reinforce a connection with the enacted healthcare reform in the US, and show how this act is unrepentant "socialism".

Much of the comments about poor Soviet medicine are correct, but not for the reasons ascribed. Soviet medicine was poor because the state ran the economy from top to bottom, as befits communism, and allocated so little to medicine that it became shoddy. Meanwhile, it allocated plenty to heavy industry and the military. That's why the only way to get any treatment was through backdoor approaches, like bribery, or being a party official. That's hardly an indictment against universal healthcare, as the same has not happened in other nations that have adopted it. Despite the author's claims, countries such as the UK, Germany, and France enjoy a better quality of medical care than in the US, based on published statistics (which the author enjoyed skewing).

I'm rather amused as well by the following:
"Even today, according to the State Statistics Committee, the average life expectancy for Russian men is less than 59 years — 58 years and 11 months — while that for Russian women is 72 years."

So what happened? Communism collapsed in 1991 and yet life expectancy hasn't changed a bit.

Here's another funny one:
"Britain pioneered in developing kidney-dialysis technology, and yet the country has one of the lowest dialysis rates in the world."

By that logic, the US should be pleased to have a higher murder rate due to its pioneering invention of handguns.

More seemingly deliberate lies:
"Real "savings" in a socialized healthcare system could be achieved only by squeezing providers and denying care — there is no other way to save. "

As an economist, the author should know better. Saving can also be achieved by reducing waste, for example.

"Socialized medical systems have not served to raise general health or living standards anywhere."

Except in Germany, France, Italy, UK, Spain, and nearly everywhere it has been adopted in the world today.

A second article, on how the personal experience changes under state-controlled systems, and what citizens can expect a few years later:

Nothing more than unsubstantiated opinion meant to arouse political sentiment with Americans.

To those who say that this cannot happen, I would point to the dismal state of half (or more) of the US' school system, and how it is divided into the "good" and "bad" tiers, exactly as expected.

In fact, this is a poor comparison, because the US education system is not centralized, but decentralized, with each school district forced to rely on local taxes for funding and even enacting its own curriculum, causing poor neighborhoods to have bad school, and rich to have excellent schools. This ensures (perhaps even by design) that the poor will always remain that way, unable to gain economic mobility by education.

 

[Cutlass]

I'm very intrigued by this linear, deteministic model of politics. Mainly because I'm curious to know: If moving to the 'left' brings us to communism and moving to the 'right' brings us to libertarianism, and all politics conforms to this, do we have to go through Tannistry when moving towards communism or libertarianism? What about Legitimism? Jacobitism?

Moving to the right in US politics is moving to authoritarianism.

 

[ParkCungHee]

Moving to the right in US politics is moving to authoritarianism.

Uh huh. When does this let me get my family together to conduct cattle raids?

 

[Yeekim]

I think it's safe to say that Mr. Maltzev has some baggage from the Soviet era. No doubt it sucked, and distancing oneself as much as possible from bad experiences is a perfectly
normal human reaction.

That still doesn't mean that mises.org has any contact with reality.

This, basically. Aneeshm, I am quite surprised you've let your intelligence be insulted by buying into anything from mises.org.

 

[Ajidica]

As soon as we reach anarchism. The right likes theocratic authoritarian anarchism, or where the government says you can do whatever you want as long as 'christian' values are enforced.

 

[ParkCungHee]

As soon as we reach anarchism. The right likes theocratic authoritarian anarchism, or where the government says you can do whatever you want as long as 'christian' values are enforced.

I'm not talking about anarchism. Quite the opposite. I'm talking about a confusing and archaic system based on Brehonic law and equal claims to inheritence, by which extended families form the basis of government.

 

[Ajidica]

Nevermind. It was a slightly spammy and rude post. I was refrencing how the right seems to like the govt enforcing their view of morality but telling them to GTFO out of everything else and that the morality the govt enforces is based on a strict Christian fundamentalist sense. Ignore my post.

 

[Cheezy the Wiz]

So the guy is lying about his experiences of Soviet healthcare?

Yes.

EDIT: It doesn't happen overnight. It never happens overnight. It's slow, and gradual, horrifying, and banal, like all evil.

Except for the evils of reactionism, which are unfortunately already here.

 

[Cutlass]

Uh huh. When does this let me get my family together to conduct cattle raids?

100 years ago

 

[GinandTonic]

It doesn't.

In 20 more years, where do you see the system?

a) To the left of where it is currently.
b) To the right of where it is currently.
c) Where it is currently.




Left does not mean auto-communism. In its mature form, it approaches Brezhnevian socialism, with all its attendant inefficiencies. The communists got there with one big revolution. You'll get there with a hundred little ones.

While other pros and cons may be debatable the NHS is factually one of the most efficient health care systems in the world. The French more mixed model spends a lot more money for marginal gains. The US socialise-the-loss privatise-the-profits model is demonstrably the least efficient. Indeed the greatest failure of the NHS in recent years was the privatising of the cleaning contracts and subsequent massive rise in hospital acquired infections - something that is finally being brought under control by being brought back in house.

The worst possible route to criticise socialised healthcare is efficiently.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

Moderator Action: Considering the posts that state the unreliability of the articles quoted in the OP, it seems that this thread is not very useful for productive discussion. Closed.