Sunday, February 01, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal
VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: A murderous system? Let's try it here!
When Boris Yeltsin had heart surgery in 1996, Richard Salsman, a Cambridge, Mass., economist and senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute, reported: "Heart surgery is `free' for Russian citizens, but 98 percent of those needing bypass operations die without getting them. Some choose not to even seek needed care. Dr. Yevgeny Rogozin, of Moscow's Cardiology Center, reveals that `Many people in this country are afraid to let someone take a knife to their heart.' ...
"Why is this so? Because decades of socialism have replaced conscientious medical professionals with low-skilled, mindless bureaucrats. ... Under socialism, doctors have no freedom to choose the terms under which they work: not whom they treat, nor how, nor at what price. They must surrender their private concerns and serve the `public interest.' There is no profit in being a good Russian doctor -- so good doctors disappear. Patients are thus left in the incompetent hands of those who are skilled -- not in advanced medical procedures -- but in obedience to government directives."
Lew Rockwell, of the Ludwig von Mises Institute in Auburn, Ala., expanded on this point in his essay "Subsidizing Sickness: Medicine and the State":
"To control people's access to medical care is to control their very lives, so it is no wonder that this is the goal of every state." That's why, "In the course of a century we have taken a long march from a largely free system of medical provision to one dominated by unfree programs and mandates."
The Soviet Union was, of course, the first country to adopt all-round socialized medical care -- the dream of most of America's modern politicians, Republicrat and Demopublican alike. In 1919, Lenin signed a decree that said every Soviet citizen had a right to free medical care. By 1977, this right had dramatically expanded to become the right to health itself -- language now regularly employed by U.S. politicians.
"In the in-between years," Mr. Rockwell reports, "the Soviet Union became host to one of the most backward, murderous, and coercive systems of medical provision every concocted. The country trained more doctors than any in the world, but the vital statistics showed a more complete picture. Lifespans averaged 10 to 20 years less than in western countries.
"Infant mortality was twice as high. By the time of the collapse of socialism, 80 million people were said to have chronic illnesses, and up to 68 percent of the public was health-deficient by international standards. Mental retardation afflicted nearly a quarter of the children -- a consequence of serious deprivation. ...
"Of course most real care went underground, where bribing for anaesthesia was common," Mr. Rockwell concludes. "After former Soviet economist Yuri N. Maltsev ... emigrated to the U.S., he was astonished to see that the U.S. was adopting many of the principles that drove the old Soviet system. But in the U.S., it is not called socialism or communism. It is called insurance."
Where did all the good potential Russian doctors go? They took engineering degrees, of course, and went to work building MiG fighters and assault rifles -- the only things the Russians did well.
The communists were great at declaring new "rights," like our recent letter-writer's "right to medical care."
The Russian communists long ago decreed the people had a right to cheap chicken. The price of chicken was duly set at the government mandated rate. Of course, Maltsev (a former economic adviser to Leonid Brezhnev) tells me in person that it was impossible to deliver chickens to the stores at the price mandated, so when you went into a communist food distribution depot there was hardly ever any actual chicken. And so the Russian people made do on whatever ration of rice and suet the stores were handing out to the people waiting in the interminable lines in the dark and the snow that week; they went to sleep hungry and malnourished but much cheered by the certainty that no greedy capitalists were making obscene profits by actually delivering them any chicken.
Today, chicken prices in Russia are allowed to go as high as competition will allow, and there's plenty of chicken in the markets of Moscow. Yet here in America, our own smug and simpering socialists, brave disciples of Messrs. Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky ("useful idiots," in Comrade Stalin's phrase, who never had to actually share the 70-year nightmare of our Russian brethren) assure us, "The free market just can't work when it comes to necessities." Like, um ... food distribution?
Every other "civilized" nation has socialized medicine, these prancing collectivists desperately prevaricate.
But I personally know fine Canadian physicians who emigrated to America when socialized medicine was imposed there -- and Canadian patients who spend their own money to visit America for our superior care, rather than dying as they wait for the rationed "free services" now offered in the land of our increasingly fascist and fuzzy-minded neighbors to the north.
Some of those same emigre Canadian physicians are now talking about building clinics in northern Mexico, where they'll again be free to offer their services on a cash basis -- or else going into the hawking of vitamins and nutritional supplements, abandoning their life-saving medical specialties entirely in order to escape the increasing regulation of a more straightforward medical practice.
What a loss.
"But that can't happen here! This is America! We'll have safeguards; we'll have oversight; we'll have regulaaaations!" shriek these simpering socialist bed-wetters, putting on a brave face and whistling past the graveyard of the millions of moldering corpses their system piled up on the world's doorstep between 1917 and 1991.
No, you'll have communism ... and we've all seen how it works.
Comrade.
Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega." His Web site is www.privacyalert.us.
