Great headlines sell newspapers.
Black and white issues demand attention. Clear extremes introduce conflict into otherwise dry discussion. They call listeners to take a stand, make a decision, to stand up for ‘what’s right!’
Healthcare pundits and experts have failed to ‘fix’ the system for decades. It’s impossibly complex.
They grow frustrated.
We grow impatient.
Frustration craves simplification.
Simplicity fuels decisive action.
But healthcare complexity requires balance and nuance. Headlines designed to sell on conflict and our impatience with complexity helps polarize healthcare debate.
Healthcare Extremes
Ideological socialists fight passionately against anything to do with choice, competition, or markets. Dogmatic capitalists rail against state ownership of production, third party control and freeloaders.
Socialists insist healthcare, like the military, should be centrally funded and controlled. Capitalists argue the opposite.
Both extremes fail.
Socialism and Capitalism
Socialism describes an economic system where the state, on behalf of society, collectively owns and operates the means of production and distributes the proceeds. Capitalism describes a system where individuals own and operate the means of production and benefit personally from the proceeds of their efforts.
Great economies include elements of both.
No country has a market-based court or military. Societies need socialized legal and defense services. On the other hand, decades of price fixing in Eastern Europe caused rationing and created a massive black market. Creativity, innovation and industry flourish with freedom and property ownership.
Healthcare Socialism and Capitalism
Great systems have some state organization of services but also competition, choice and innovation.
Socialist ideology has no mechanism to match the creativity, innovation and progress of market forces flowing from consumer choice. Free market capitalists have no room for ‘free care’ or helping those who cannot help themselves.
It strains one’s imagination to come up with a free market system for heart transplantation or organ donation that didn’t beggar all sense of generally accepted ethical principles. So too, it infuriates providers when bureaucrats who don’t know the difference between an IV and an IVP tell clinicians how to practice their profession, at patients’ expense.
Stalemate
Canadian Medicare is frozen by extremes. Socialists resist any whiff of market thinking. Free-market capitalists want to scrap Medicare and start over. Stalemate leaves politicians spending more to buy votes without substantive change. They prop up a mired system that rewards hospitals and providers for providing great service to governments, regulators and guidelines instead of patients.
What do you think? Do we just need more of the same – more spending, more control, tighter systems? Do we need to start over with a completely free market approach? Or do we need something in the middle, something that includes the best elements of socialism and capitalism?
photo credit: pando.com
Haha.
Love the Matrix reference Shawn.
Keep up the good work!
🙂
Glad someone enjoyed it! I didn’t want to blur the argument by linking it to the philosophy of the Matrix too explicitly. But for those who’ve been down the rabbit hole…there’s some truth in light of assumptions that we have the best system in the world.
Thanks again for reading and commenting!!
S
From a historical perspective I have some problems with: ” decades of price fixing in Eastern Europe caused rationing and created a massive black market. ” The causes of revolution in Russia had much to do with war, crop failures, rampant inflation, and a weak imperial government. Those conditions had led to an environment of food scarcity, rationing, and black markets long before socialism took root. In these conditions it was not surprising that simple solutions failed to achieve the desired result. It was as much a lack of effective leadership as anything.
We absolutely need the best of socialism and capitalism. Effective socialism recognizes that there will always be a gap between rich and poor. Effective capitalism recognizes that the affluent in society bear a greater burden of responsibility to the less affluent, the healthier to the less healthy etc.
Hey Jon,
Thanks so much for taking time to read and comment! Great point about Russia’s challenges. My thoughts came from a few friends who remember growing up in Eastern Europe, leaving offices full of patients to go line up for laundry detergent when a shipment came in. Prices were great, but supply not so much.
I really liked how you captured the core issues for both socialism and capitalism! Well said.
Thanks again for taking time to read and comment!
Best
Shawn
Addendum: I’ve thought about your comment since I first read it, Jon. Did the atrocities in Russia result from the Communist version of socialism, or did they result from natural disasters, crop failures, etc?
It turns out that many have tried to blame the woes of Russia on natural causes deflecting blame from the political system. But it’s not true. Dr. Ewalde Ammende wrote in Human Life in Russia (1936) that:
“All serious observers of conditions in Soviet Russia are of one opinion as to the causes of the Russian famine. In their view the real cause is to be found not in any natural events, but in the fiasco of the collective system which was introduced with such excessive haste.”
Thanks again for getting me to think more deeply on this!
S