Bad Medicine

Financial Disaster!

Socialized medicine is sooner or later simply unaffordable! William Goodman points out "...potential demands [for medical services] are completely unrestricted, but the money to pay for them is not." Sweden is a perfect example as Rob Norton notes "No nation in the world better exemplified the concept of cradle-to the-grave socialism [with socialized health care] in the decades after World War II. But by the Nineties, Sweden had become a land of oppressive taxes (63% of GDP, compared with 31% for the U.S.) and economic dysfunction." Both countries are currently greatly cutting the sizes of their health care plans to combat the growing health care funding deficit. Current government spending on medical care is already out of control as Richard Taketa observes, "Federal investigators report that in 1996 Medicare had overpaid healthcare providers approximately $23 billion (or 14% of the total standard Medicare Trust Fund allocation)." Expanding this system to total socialized medical care would only make these problems worse. William Goodman gives another example from the Canadian system which shows what socialized healthcare can do to tax costs: "If an American works full-time for a year...the total burden of taxes is so heavy that it consumes his entire income from January 1 to May 3. In other words, he has to work four months of the year for the government...the comparable figures for a citizen of Ontario are January 1 to July 7th! A Canadian has to work over six months...for taxes." (also see Socialized Medicine: The Canadian Experience by Pierre Lemieux) Socialized medicine provides "�free� benefits on one hand with massive increases in taxes, public debt, and inflation on the other (Goodman)."

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