What's Wrong with Government-Run Healthcare? | 5 Minute Video

If you get sick or suffer a serious injury, you not only want medical care, you want quality medical care. What’s the best way to get it? Through a government-run program like Medicare for All or through our current free market system? Stanford policy expert Lanhee Chen has the answer in this video from Prager University. Get informed. After all, this is your health we’re talking about.

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Script:

It’s very easy for a politician to stand up before voters and say, “Health care is a right,” and then passionately advocate for “single-payer” or “free health care” or “Medicare for All”—whatever term they might use.

But before we consider the merits of the government managing your health care—and that’s what this all boils down to—maybe we should ask a more basic question:

What do we mean by “health care”?

Because if you get sick—and here, we’re talking major illness—or you’re in serious pain, you don’t just want health care; you want quality health care.

And where is your best chance of finding that?

The answer is right here in America.

For skilled doctors, cutting-edge medical treatments, and care without long delays, no other country rivals the United States. Not even close. Nobody from Texas is going to Canada for medical treatment. It’s almost always the other way around.

Sure, our health care system has lots of issues—and we should address them—but do we really want to upend all the advantages that we do have and start from scratch? Because that’s what would have to happen if we completely turn health care over to the government.

So, let’s imagine we make the change. We hear a lot about how great free health care would be, but it’s only fair we look at the downside.

The first is that government-run health care takes medical decisions away from patients—that means you—and puts them in the hands of bureaucrats. They decide, for example, how many MRI machines are going to be available, or under what conditions you can get back surgery or a bypass, or even whether you qualify for cancer treatment.

That’s how it works in the United Kingdom under its single-payer system. Because it has finite resources, the National Health Service, or NHS, sharply restricts access to treatments like hip and knee replacements, cataract surgery, and even prescription drugs to deal with common conditions like arthritis and diabetes. If you suffer from any of these ailments and many others in the UK, you may just have to live with the pain.

And let’s hope you don’t have a medical emergency.

In a January 2018 article in the New York Times, patients in emergency rooms around London are described as having “to wait 12 hours before they are tended to. Corridors are jammed with beds carrying [the] frail and elderly.” To deal with the situation, “hospitals [were] ordered to postpone non-urgent surgeries until the end of the month.” That hardly seems like an improvement over what we have in the US.

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