It is difficult not to support a good policy. By good, I mean, a policy that helps everyone. Universal Healthcare is one such policy. Most people believe that it is good policy like I did. But, I no longer believe that there’s any good in a universal healthcare system.
To appreciate this claim, let’s address the elephant in the room. Universal healthcare usually implies a dishing out of the same quality of healthcare to everyone, to the rich and the poor, to the haves and the have-nots, regardless of the ability to pay. Healthcare of this nature, although unnatural or even inorganic, can be laudable. Unnatural or inorganic in the sense that it removes the will for the individual to seek, by any reasonable means necessary, better and better healthcare for himself and his family. But, a healthcare safety net for those who cannot afford it is laudable. No doubt. No one enjoys to see people suffer as a result of ill health.
However, universal healthcare has another side to it. An entirely clandestine side that most people are not wont to admire. Universal healthcare also implies that healthcare companies and providers, including pharmaceutical companies, public and private, no matter, which are still driven by the need to make profits can, and will, hijack the system in an oligarchic manner. Universal healthcare grants healthcare systems power to abuse patients since these patients have no other choice. The system guarantees a certain level of revenue to the healthcare companies through enforcement.
Like free food prison, no one can pick what food, the quality of food and how much food to eat. If one is hungry, one is supposed to eat. There’s no other food outside or inside the prison. One cannot escape prison food. One can also get punished, charged and arrested for attempted suicide if one refused to eat. The prison, in this case the universal healthcare system, dictates all the requirements for care and treatment.
If a child is ill, he or she must receive not only a universal healthcare, but a particular kind of treatment prescribed by the hospital, its doctors and the pharmaceutical industrial complex. The parents of the child would have no alternatives. They couldn’t refuse the diet or treatment whether they knew it was bad for the child or not! What happens when a patient refuses the care? What happens when you refuse food that you believe is bad for you?
With a universal healthcare system, it is well-nigh impossible to refuse bad treatment, in the same way that it is impossible to refuse bad food in a state prison. There is no other alternative. Some might think that this is a harsh critique, that a universal healthcare system provides alternatives—different hospitals, different drug stores, different doctors, different drugs, different beds, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t. These are not true alternatives. Only competition among healthcare companies and providers, among pharmaceutical companies, among clinics and ambulances breeds alternatives or choices, not a guaranteed patient-revenue base.
Which is what universal healthcare truly is. It is not a solution to the lack of healthcare for the poor or the availability of expensive surgery to the have-nots. Far from it. Universal healthcare is a concretization of the revenue base accruing to hospitals and clinics, to the pharmaceutical industrial complex and their doctors and nurses. It is tyranny. This is why healthcare providers push for a universal healthcare system. If the poor walks into a hospital under a universal healthcare system and the revenue base to profit ratio cannot support an expensive surgery or treatment, that poor lad will not receive the life-saving operation.
Yet, he is guaranteed some kind of diet as treatment whether he likes it or not, or whether it is effective or not, and the government or the state has to pay for it. That is the definition of a universal healthcare system!
Some will argue that this is probably better than nothing in a natural environment, but I argue that it is worse. Why pay for ineffective treatment? Even worse, ineffective treatment has real side effects, which warrants more treatment that could result in the need for a compounding cascade of ineffective treatments. Universal healthcare only leads one way: to extortionary practices by healthcare providers whether or not they provide effective treatment to patients. Why build a system that is guaranteed to become extortionary? How would healthcare providers be incentivized to provide better care if their profits are guaranteed?
The nature of the healthcare that is provided under a universal healthcare system may start with the lure of it being free. However, as it turns out, it quickly devolves from free to pernicious and insidious. There’s no place for universal anything in a human environment. The Ancestors have always known this: nothing is free. Sooner or later the society pays a hefty price for guaranteeing free stuff.
The better place for the state or the government is to assist with providing an environment where better and affordable healthcare providers can thrive and flourish. An environment that is open to competition, scrutiny and challenge. An environment that incentives innovation, ingenuity and measurable healthcare progress, not for the government to assist the pharmaceutical companies and their healthcare providers to set up shop to fleece an entire population, whether we like it or not.
