Doctors ‘Go Galt’ in government-run health care programs
From Ed Morrissey at Hot Air, commenting on this story in the Wall Street Journal:
“What happens when government regulation makes it more expensive to bill for medical services than providers receive? More and more, providers opt out of those systems like Medicare and Medicaid, and patients have to go out of pocket to see specialists. And if you think that will change in universal health care, think again. …
“This scenario is not academic. The health systems in Canada and the UK have shortages of doctors, especially specialists like dentists, transplant surgeons, and the like, which is why it takes months to get testing and diagnosis even for serious illnesses. Why? It costs a lot of money to go through medical school and residencies for surgical specialties. The limited amount of compensation for the work they do makes the debt burden of training too heavy. Instead, more doctors stop at the general practice level, leaving artificial shortages in the specialties. Others move overseas to nations without single-payer systems in order to ply their trade for a proper level of compensation.
“If we want to create shortages of medical services here in the US, single-payer care is the way to go. The red tape of Medicare and Medicaid is already creating such shortages among those patients the system is designed to help.”
Health care really is where the line in the sand should be drawn. Why we would want to dismantle the highest quality health care in the world for the sake of saying that we’re “working for the common good” is beyond me. It doesn’t matter if every one has coverage when the care is shoddy — that just means we’re all equally sick.
And once government-run health care starts, we’d likely never be able to roll it back.
