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Especially from the Democratic presidential candidates there appears to be a significant push for “universal” (i.e. socialist) healthcare. Out of the top three in the running Obama has come out for implementing it in six years, Hillary is infamous for her push to do so back in ‘93 as first lady, and Edwards has already outlined as specific plan for it. And, at the same time, outside of Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), no republican candidate appears as they will come out principled against the idea.

Steve Trinward, editor-in-chief of Progressive News Digest, editorialized on the contenders positions:

On the Democratic side of the ledger, the three front-runners tend to agree for the most part: the only answer they see to the healthcare mess is nationalized, single-payer health insurance. This is hardly surprising from Sen. Hillary Clinton, since she was the person most behind the much-hyped program labeled “HillaryCare” back in the early days of her husband’s first term in the White House. However, it is also the message being delivered by her two fellow Senators (and closest competitors at this point), Barack Obama of Illinois and John Edwards, who formerly represented North Carolina.

Obama even came out recently with his own call for “universal health care within six years.” Speaking at a conference of the health care advocacy group, Families USA, the junior Senator from Illinois said “the time has come” for this measure to become reality, and affirmed that, “I am absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country.”

Almost echoing his words, while speaking before constituents at a New York community health clinic, Sen. Clinton reportedly stated that, “One of the goals that I will be presenting … is health insurance for every child and universal health care for every American. That’s a very major part of my campaign and I want to hear people’s ideas about how we can achieve that goal.”

Meanwhile, John Edwards was detailing his own prescription for reform, also seeking universal healthcare, as well as placing individual mandates on each of us, along with tax increases to pay for the inevitable subsidies for those deemed unable to afford such compliance. His own estimates called for about a $120 billion annual price-tag on the proposed program.

“We’re asking everybody to share in the responsibility of making health care work in this country,” he reportedly said, during a Meet the Press appearance. “Yes, we’ll have to raise taxes. The only way you can pay for a health care plan that costs anywhere from $90 [billion] to $120 billion is there has to be a revenue source.”

There is the danger that there will be socialized medicine in this country by 2012, and apparently the idea is no longer a third rail either as mainstream candidates have been pushing it as a prominent part of their platform. Indeed, already the government is very involved in the healthcare industry–probably more than any other industry in the US–so it would not take much at this point to reach full nationalization.

But let us take a look at what happens when you do nationalize medicine, and to do so let us take another very wealthy first world country as our case-study. Our neighbors to the great white north have had it since 1966 and it is overly apparent that the nation’s health services have suffered. In Canada, the industry is mired by doctor and nurse shortages, long waiting periods, lack of advanced medical services, and lack of innovation, to name only a few problems.

On Thursday George Mason University economist, Walter E. Williams wrote an article answering “do we want to socialize medicine?”:

Problems with our health care system are leading some to fall prey to proposals calling for a nationalized single-payer health care system like Canada’s or Britain’s. There are a few things that we might take into consideration before falling for these proposals.

London’s Observer (3/3/02) carried a story saying that an “unpublished report shows some patients are now having to wait more than eight months for treatment, during which time many of their cancers become incurable.” Another story said, “According to a World Health Organisation report to be published later this year, around 10,000 British people die unnecessarily from cancer each year — three times as many as are killed on our roads.”

The Observer (12/16/01) also reported, “A recent academic study showed National Health Service delays in bowel cancer treatment were so great that, in one in five cases, cancer which was curable at the time of diagnosis had become incurable by the time of treatment.”

The story is no better in Canada’s national health care system. The Vancouver, British Columbia-based Fraser Institute has a yearly publication titled, “Waiting Your Turn.” Its 2006 edition gives waiting times, by treatments, from a person’s referral by a general practitioner to treatment by a specialist. The shortest waiting time was for oncology (4.9 weeks). The longest waiting time was for orthopedic surgery (40.3 weeks), followed by plastic surgery (35.4 weeks) and neurosurgery (31.7 weeks).

Canadians face significant waiting times for various diagnostics such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and ultrasound scans. The median wait for a CT scan across Canada was 4.3 weeks, but in Prince Edward Island, it’s 9 weeks. A Canadian’s median wait for an MRI was 10.3 weeks, but in Newfoundland, patients waited 28 weeks. Finally, the median wait for an ultrasound was 3.8 weeks across Canada, but in Manitoba and Prince Edward Island it was 8 weeks.

Despite the long waiting times Canadians suffer, sometimes resulting in death, under federal law, private clinics are not legally allowed to provide services covered by the Canada Health Act. Regardless of this prohibition, a few black-market clinics service patients who are willing to break the law to get treatment. In British Columbia, for example, Bill 82 provides that a physician can be fined up to $20,000 for accepting fees for surgery. According to a Canada News article, “Shortage of Doctors and Nurses Could Hurt Medicare Reforms” (3/5/03), about 10,000 doctors left Canada during the 1990s.

There’s help for some Canadian patients. According to a Canadian Medical Association Journal article, “U.S. Hospitals Use Waiting-List Woes to Woo Canadians” (2/22/2000), “British Columbia patients fed up with sojourns on waiting lists as they await tests or treatment are being wooed by a hospital in Washington state that has begun offering package deals. A second U.S. hospital is also considering marketing its services.” One of the attractions is that an MRI, which can take anywhere from 10 to 28 weeks in Canada, can be had in two days at Olympic Memorial Hospital in Port Angeles, Wash. Already, Cleveland is Canada’s hip-replacement center.

Some of our politicians hold up the Canadian and British nationalized health care systems as models for us. You can bet that should we ever have such a system, they would exempt themselves from what the rest of us would have to endure.

There’s a cure for our health care problems. That cure is not to demand more government but less government. I challenge anyone to identify a problem with health care in America that is not caused or aggravated by federal, state and local governments. And, I challenge anyone to show me people dying on the streets because they don’t have health insurance.

The facts, theory, and morality are perpetually clear on socialized health care. I’ve always wondered, if socializing medicine is such a great idea why not socialize everything else too? I’d like the ‘08 candidates to address this inconsistency during the primaries although I doubt any will, that is of course with the exception of the only one who actually believes in freedom–Congressman Paul.

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The What happens when you socialize medicine? by New School Politics, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.