What's Wrong with Socialized Medicine?

This week aside from the protests in Iran, the news and Sunday political shows were filled with a variety of opinions on Obama's desire for a national public health care plan. While the advantages of such a plan are simple; i.e. universal access and coverage, opponents suggest that the disadvantages are too numerous to mention. However their primary concerns are (1) keeping government out of health care; and (2) arguing that no one wants or needs socialized medicine.

For quite a while I bought into these arguments as my natural inclinations are capitalistic. But after following this issue for a while I have made a 180 degree turn; and my logic is rather simple.

First, for those who want the government out of health care, the reality is that ship sailed more than 40 years ago. If you simply add up Medicare, Medicaid, Indian Health Service, Veterans Administration and Railroad Retirement expenditures, you will discover that the government already pays more than 45% of the entire U.S. health care bill. Do we really want government to bail out of these programs? I don't think so.

But what about socialized medicine? We certainly don't want that, right? Well, I'm not so sure about that. What exactly is socialized medicine?

From my perspective, socialism is when the government controls industrial resources, or what Marx called the "means of production." So back in the 1970's we laughed at the Soviet Union's inefficient government-run agricultural cooperatives, where production was low and there were no incentives to increase production or efficiencies. Through examples such as these, we came to conclude that government was incompetent and couldn't organize a two-car funeral procession!

But clearly, there are many other services we want our government to control; right? When we call 911 do we want an emergency dispatch operator to first ask us whether we have "police insurance" and if so, what our policy number is? Heck no ... get the cops here right now!

But then why is it OK for such an exchange to occur in the hospital emergency room, but not on a 911 call? Does this suggest that we actually want socialized police protection, socialized fire protection, socialized national defense and socialized roads and bridges, but not ... socialized medicine? And if so why?

Well the answer seems to be simple. While the free markets are optimal for the exchange of most goods and services, they don't really work well for society's essential services. Services such as police and fire protection, clean water, roads and bridges and national defense are so central to our collective well-being, that we decided to exempt these services from the marketplace. Rather, we prefer to collectively tax ourselves to ensure that we all have access to these important services regardless of our ability to pay.

So the real question here is when will enough Americans come to the conclusion that access to health care is an essential service? And when we arrive at that point we just may begin to wonder ... So what's so wrong with socialized medicine?