The lovely ladies over at Twitchy.com brought to their readers’ attention this week a complaint from Canadian citizen Glen McGregor, who posted on X that he injured his knee playing softball and will need an MRI, but the province of Ontario requires that he get an ultrasound first.
OK, fair enough. Except that McGregor was told by the local medical imaging facility that the wait for an ultrasound would be one to two years — and would he like to be added to the waitlist?
Commentors on McGregor’s post noted that this is what “free” and “universal” health care means; that subsidizing millions of illegal immigrants doesn’t help matters; that Canada is quick to offer MAID (“Medical Assistance In Dying”) if you can’t wait for care (or are denied it — yes, that happens too); and that while health care in the United States can be ungodly expensive, access is nearly immediate.
I often write about the disastrous results of central economic planning (including health care). In fact, I wrote a column on that topic at the end of the first year of the Biden administration, in which I referenced a university panel discussion I had attended years earlier. “Obamacare” was much in the news at the time, so the topic of that panel discussion was (unsurprisingly) the benefits of “free” and “universal” health care.
And — oh, the irony — access to MRIs featured prominently.
One of the speakers defending the Canadian system was indignant about the number of MRI facilities in the United States, arguing that Canada had far fewer such facilities, and it was just fine. She complained that both hospitals in her town had MRI machines, and both were adding hospital beds. “Why should every town have an MRI facility?” she protested angrily. “And we don’t need that many hospital beds.” In her opinion (though she was neither a physician nor an expert in health care administration), the government was in a better position to decide what medical resources people needed in any given area.
Looking back at that discussion, I wrote in 2021, “Had (the female panelist) been in a position to stop the two hospitals’ capital expenditures, neither one would likely have been able to meet the (then) unforeseen capacity issues caused by last year’s COVID-19 pandemic — not to mention to growing demand for services created by an aging population. How many times do we have to learn this lesson? No one can predict the future.”
And now — 15 or so years after that panel discussion — poor McGregor is on a one- to two-year waitlist for an ultrasound in Canada. After which, presumably, he’ll get on another waitlist for the MRI.
Would the female panelist still think that’s “just fine”?
But there were even more insights into the central planners’ fever dreams in that panel discussion. Again, quoting from my 2021 column:
“Another academic in the audience stood up to emphatically support her position. He was irate about toothpaste. ‘I was just at the drug store,’ he said, ‘and there had to have been 20 brands of toothpaste. We don’t need 20 brands of toothpaste!’
“Welcome to the worldview that spawned the Soviet Union’s breadlines and Venezuela’s national dumpster diet of zoo animals.”
“Health care is a human right” sounds like an unassailable slogan. But – as McGregor’s experience demonstrates — the reality of government-dispensed health care is very different: It’s no longer a right; it’s barely even an option.
The same puckered planners who insist that there are too many MRI machines, hospital beds and brands of toothpaste will, if given the chance, demand that there be fewer types of fruits in the produce section of the grocery store (who eats dragon fruit, anyway?), varieties of cars (why isn’t one kind of car enough? You have four children? Oh, there’s the problem — you have too many children …) and brands of shoes. In fact, as they think about it, there are just too many damn sizes of shoes.
They will assure you that the government — meaning they and their cronies — will do a better job and fairer job of allocating resources and producing society’s goods and services than all these proliferating entrepreneurs and private companies.
But history proves otherwise.
Opponents of communism and socialism often focus — quite properly — on the political oppression characteristic of those types of governments. But it’s worth remembering that of the 100 million to 150 million people who have died under collectivist regimes, most haven’t died in wars or in concentration camps or at the hands of dictators and their secret police in political “purges.”
No, most starved to death.
And that doesn’t even count the millions more who suffered but survived privations of all sorts. (Many such individuals and their families have immigrated to the United States, and they know firsthand what it is like to live under collectivist economic systems.)
In most cases, the famines and economic collapses that caused such widespread devastation and death weren’t planned; they were the results of ignorance, arrogance and too much power.
No one can predict the future.
You’d think these lessons, played out over and over again with tens of millions of victims as evidence, would be crystal clear by now.
And yet here we are, with a candidate — Zohran Mamdani — running for mayor of New York City, happily proclaiming himself to be a socialist (notwithstanding The New York Times’ flaccid attempt to paint him as something else), and trying to sell the city’s residents on the benefits of government-owned grocery stores, among other pie-in-the-sky policy proposals.
New York City should take a lesson from Canada (or Venezuela or Cuba or Cambodia or Vietnam or North Korea or Zimbabwe or the Soviet Union): Put the government in charge of anything economic, and it will become expensive, inefficient and inaccessible — except to people with money or political power, of course.
Don’t give communists or socialists (“democratic” or otherwise) or central planners of any sort any power.
Ever.
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