The weird part of this article is that Ms. Gould misses all of the consequences of her suggestion. Does anyone think we’d be able to deny non-citizens this “free” health care? We’re trying to reduce the number of illegal aliens here in the States. One significant difference between Canada and Britain on the one hand and the United States on the other is what those countries are close to. Canada is to the far north, and very distant from Latin America, and Britain doesn’t even have a land-based border with any other country. You have to cross the English Channel to get there, as everyone from William the Conqueror to Napoleon to Hitler found out. And, not to put too fine a point on it, most of the European nations that have national health care *also* have pretty restrictive rules and laws regarding whether you can immigrate to their country and become eligible for their health care without paying someone something.
Imagine the United States trying something like this. We can’t stop illegals from entering the country, selling drugs and otherwise committing crimes, and then skating on bail and running back to Mexico or wherever. So the problem becomes this: when you speak of nationalizing health care, you have to take whatever the private sector spends, collectively, on health care, and start adding zeros to it, and when you come to a figure astronomical enough to actually cover everything, then you have to raise taxes enough to pay for everything. Talk about killing off the economy!
There is one more thing. Just because Britain has a good experience with some parts of a nationalized health care system doesn’t mean that an American version of it would be identical with the British one. In reality, it’d probably look more like the a cross between the post office and the IRS, with stethoscopes. The military has hospital systems for its personnel, and of course the VA provides health care for retired military. Anyone remember the problems at Walter Reed? The VA has been the subject of repeated investigations into its records of incompetence, indifference, and lack of funding (of course). Does *anyone* think that we need a hospital system that functions as well as our school system does? We’d have a phalanx of bureaucrats tinkering with an enormous organization that didn’t work, and no one would be able to get anything they needed.
