CHANGE: Nordic Countries Increasingly Giving Welfare State the Cold Shoulder.

Putatitively socialist Swedes are increasingly turning to private insurance to reduce long wait times and rationed health care services. It’s not simply in medicine that Sweden is moving toward market-based models. As Johnny Munkhammar detailed in 2005’s European Dawn: After the Social Model, the country started cutting government spending as a percentage of GDP in the 1990s and that has proceeded apace.

Nor is it only Sweden that is giving a cold shoulder to the welfare state. AFP reports that throughout the Nordic countries, the size and scope of government is being cut as “nations find themselves cash-strapped.”

Sooner or later, you run out of other people’s money.