On Healthcare
Free Talk Live
Friday, 19 September 2009
Click here to download this episode
00:00:22
Ian Freeman:
We’re going to start things out here tonight with a little story—an educational story—about what will inevitably happen here in the United States if fully government-controlled—socialised medicine, care, system—comes down. Or should I say when it comes down, because they sure are working hard in D.C., as I think you’ve pointed out in the past, Mark, if these Republicans aren’t going to give in on this issue, why are they trying to cut deals? And they’re up there—they’re trying to make it sound like they’re “making a stand for freedom,” but at the same time, they’re coming up with ideas and modifications to the plan, to, you know, come to a compromise.
Mark Edge:
Well this is the sausage-making you hear about in Washington, you know, nobody wants to, you know, see the sausages or politics made, or whatever the quote is— You’re right, but at the very least with sausage, I get the choices as to whether or not I want to buy it; however, when these politicians get together and they start making their little compromises so that “everybody’s happy,” not everyone wants to—I don’t wabt to buy it. I don’t want it. The fact is, I believe the Republicans are going to compromise on this one, and—
Ian Freeman:
It’s just a matter of time.
Mark Edge:
Yeah—I don’t know how it’s gonna be, but we’re probably going to get even a worse system. I think you would probably get a better system if big-brain Harvard Barack Obama got up there—
Ian Freeman:
Oh, no.
Mark Edge:
—and just handed down a socialised system.
Ian Freeman:
That’s a stretch.
Mark Edge:
It would be crappy, but it’s not going to be as crappy as the compromise that they’re going to come up with. You understand what I’m saying?
Ian Freeman:
It’s hard to say. I see where you’re coming from, but—
Mark Edge:
Well, the system we have today is crappy—
Ian Freeman:
Oh, yes it is!
Mark Edge:
—because it’s a compromise all throughout the years. “Oh, we’ve gotta help the children! We’ve gotta help the old people! Medicine costs too much!” All the stuff [problems] that has come along, it’s all due to government regulations on the medical industry in the first place.
Ian Freeman:
Yes. It’s a mostly-socialised system, as we’ve pointed out so many times, but it bears pointing out because we’ve always got new people tuning in. The existing system is not free market.
Mark Edge:
No.
Ian Freeman:
Even though there might be some pundits in the news—on the Sunday morning news programmes (I don’t really know, I don’t watch those things)—but even though there might be some (I’m speculating here) saying that “this is a free market and it’s failed!”—well, no, it’s not a free market, because any market in which there are regulatory aspects from a violent monopoly calling itself “the government”—anytime you have government regulations, you don’t have a free market. And the healthcare industry is incredibly regulated. It’s just tremendously burdened with regulations.
Mark Edge:
Absolutely. You can’t even practice medicine unless you’ve jumped through the union hoops…. You have to be a member of their union in order to practice medicine in the United States; that’s not true of any other industry at all. You have to be a member of the A.M.A.
Ian Freeman:
Now let me say something: I think that people should be able to get healthcare, I think that healthcare should be excellent quality, I think that it should be affordable, so I want to make it clear that I support people being able to access quality, affordable healthcare. But the thing is, you cannot just come down with some government programme and wave a magic wand and make that happen; people don’t have a “right” to healthcare because that would mean they have a right to the labour of other people without compensating them. Well you’d say, “Oh, the government will compensate them.” But the problem is, when you put more steps in between the buyer and the seller, you get all kinds of crazy economic problems. Because the sellers, if they don’t have the ability to price their products according to what the buyers are willing to pay—which they won’t in a government system, because the government board will sit there and set the prices and—
Mark Edge:
As it does with Medicaid and Medicare now.
Ian Freeman:
Right. It’ll say, “Okay, doc, so you’ll get this for this treatment, you’ll get this for seeing this many patients,” et cætera, et cætera, so it completely isolates them from the market signals that are necessary in order to do business in an appropriate manner.
Mark Edge:
Not to mention, that, but you don’t get the choices you do in a free market, and that’s what this story is about. This story is about choices.
Ian Freeman:
This is from the U.K.?
Mark Edge:
Yes, this is from the U.K., where they’ve got socialised medicine. This is what’s going to happen. Now I know the dimmies that are going to listen here, “no, no, your people—you’re demagoguing”—
Ian Freeman:
“We’ll do it different.”
Mark Edge:
Yep. Okay. “Doctors left a premature baby to die because he was born two days too early, his devastated mother claimed yesterday.” This was, by the way, September the tenth; so it’s been a while.
“Sarah Capewell begged them to save her tiny son, who was born just 21 weeks and five days into her pregnancy—almost four months early.”
I’m not saying this child would survive; I don’t know. What I am saying is that they didn’t try, and they would’ve under—under our system them would’ve, okay? I’m not saying our system is great, but they certainly would have tried if the mother would’ve asked. And, they won’t there because they have their rules. And that’s how it goes: you turn doctors and nurses into bureaucrats, and they become—well—as heartless and useful as the D.M.V. “They ignored her pleas and allegedly told her they were following national guidelines that”—
Ian Freeman:
“Just following orders.” Sorry.
Mark Edge:
—“that babies born before 22 weeks should not be given medical treatment.”
Ian Freeman:
Wow.
Mark Edge:
They don’t want to waste that valuable medical treatment on just a 21-week-old baby.
Ian Freeman:
They also make similar decisions at the top end of the life-cycle—
Mark Edge:
Sure they do.
Ian Freeman:
For older people, do you need to get a heart transplant at any age ninety? Well…you know…
Mark Edge:
“No, you don’t.”
Ian Freeman:
“Well, no, you’re too old.”
Mark Edge:
“Good bye.”
Ian Freeman:
“Sorry, buddy.”
Mark Edge:
What, at ninety? How about try seventy—you won’t get it.
Ian Freeman:
I’m just pulling a number…
Mark Edge:
“Miss Capewell, 23, said doctors refused to even see her son Jayden, who lived for almost two hours,” Ian—two hours this kid was alive “without any medical support.” And this was just a little biddy baby. “She said he was breathing unaided, had a strong heartbeat and was even moving his arms and legs, but medics refused to admit him to a special care baby unit.
“Miss Capewell is now fighting for a review of the medical guidelines.”
That’s all she can do, because her baby’s dead.
Ian Freeman:
Yeah.
Mark Edge:
Died, without medical treatment because it was against the “rules” to do anything for him.
Ian Freeman:
Why is it against the rules, Mark?
Mark Edge:
Well, “because they know better than you.”
Ian Freeman:
Well, doesn’t the reason usually come out as, “Ahhh, you know, health resources are limited here in the U.K.; we only have so much money; we’ve, uh, you know, we’re just going to have to ration the care because we only have so much to go around and, well, some people are more equal than others, for instance if your baby is premature, sorry, we just can’t allow it to live; I mean it’s going to be too big of a drain on the resources, we’ve got to take care of the majority of people, this money has to go to taking care of most people and I’m sorry but these elderly and infirmed folks, we’re just going to have to cut them off because, you know, they’re not paying taxes anyway, and somebody that’s retarded or somebody that is born prematurely, they’re likely going to have a lot of medical bills in their life, and so it’s going to cost a lot; we’re just going to have to cut it off and just, you know, hey, you’ve got to break a few eggs to make an omelette, right?”
Mark Edge:
I can’t imagine why the British bureaucrats responded to this article, because I know ours certainly would not; it would have been “no comment” all the way, but they say “advises doctors that medical intervention for very premature children is not in the best interests of the baby, and is not ‘standard practice’.” So, there you go; they refuse to even step in as far as this goes.
They do point out here that it is extraordinarily rare for a child to live at this age; it has been done, and Jayden might very well have been one of the children who made it, and the fact that he lived two hours after—I mean, can you imagine being the mom there? Sitting there with the little biddy baby—we’re not talking about a regular six-to-eight-pound baby; we’re talking about a tiny, tiny little baby—your progeny dying there in front of you because these doctors won’t do anything because it’s against the “rules.”
Ian Freeman:
Okay, I’m going to take the ‘socialist’ side of things, here, Mark, and say, “Mark, you’re comparing apples and oranges, here; I mean this is the U.K., they’re doing things wrong over there; if you just put me and my buddies in charge, we care about people; we think that everybody has a ‘right’ to healthcare, and that it’s going to be different here in the United States; we’ve got a lot more money here than they do over in the U.K., and so you won’t have to worry about stuff like that with the government system here.”
Mark Edge:
But we had Democrats in charge in the Senate, the House, and the White House, and they still can’t get this through—what do you want?
Ian Freeman:
“Well, wait, I’m just saying that when it does go through”—
Mark Edge:
But it’s not going to go through. Look, you’ve got the perfect storm here: Democrats in the House, Democrats in the Senate—as a matter of fact, there are sixty Democrats in the Senate—
Ian Freeman:
They all want things; you know how the log-rolling process works—
Mark Edge:
Right!
Ian Freeman:
They say, “Well, we”—
Mark Edge:
They don’t need the Republicans—you can’t get all the Democrats on board with this.
Ian Freeman:
But they still want favours, and so “we just got to deal out some favours, and then we’ll get it passed, and then, you know”—
Mark Edge:
Frankenstein’s monster of a deal—it’s not like you’ll have “real” or “good” socialised medicine, because your idea, as good as it might be, is not what is going to pass the House and the Senate and get signed by the President. None of their ideas is going to be the one that makes it, you’ll just have a Frankenstein’s monster of a deal.
Ian Freeman:
“But you’re not addressing the issue, Mark, you’re not addressing the issue that we care about premature babies.”
Mark Edge:
No, you don’t! Because the socialists in Great Britain let this one die on the table in front of their mother!
00:11:53
Ian Freeman:
We started the show out—Mark, you had a story out of the U.K., which of course, as you are probably aware, they have the National Healthcare System—they have “universal healthcare,” “government-run healthcare,” “socialist healthcare,” whatever you want to call it—it’s not a free-market place in healthcare in the U.K., and (by the way), it’s not a free market here, either—here, most money in healthcare is spent by government, so, this is a mostly-government-run healthcare system; but, still, there are private options, and there are still private options in the U.K., it’s just even fewer because the government has even more control there—
Mark Edge:
Sure.
Ian Freeman:
So, what happened was a woman had a baby, it was really premature, and she wasn’t allowed to even have the dictors try to save it. The doctors were “following the rules,” they were “following the law,” which says that if this baby is a certain amount of weeks premature, then, “we’re just not going to try to save it because it’s too expensive and, sure, we’d like to make it look like we care about people’s health, but…we just don’t care about people that are under the age of twenty-two weeks” or whatever the hell it was, and then of course this also applies to elderly people—you don’t have an example of this but it’s true—generally what happens is that if you’re too old, and you need some sort of surgery, you’ll just be told no: “Well I’m sorry, but we just can’t afford to give that to you; you’re too old, you’re not paying taxes anymore, and so you’re not really worth much to our system.”
But of course, what I brought up to those points, Mark—and I’m just trying to play the role of the socialist as we don’t actually have any on the phone—if you do believe in the government-run healthcare system, and you do want government to take total control of healthcare, we’d love to hear from you at 1-800-259-9231; you can probably do a better job of going up against this than I could—but I’m just sort of stepping into the role here as Devil’s advocate, saying, “Well, Mark, it may be true what you’re saying here—I have no reason to disbelieve you that they have these policies in Great Britain—but those are the British; I mean, come on, red coats? We’re different here in America; here in America, we care about people; we want everyone to have a right to healthcare, even premature babies, even people in their nineties; we’ve got more money here in America; we can do this the right way here.”
Mark Edge:
Well we have more money and healthcare because we don’t have the government in it; so, once you put the government in it, then you’re going to have this same kind of service you get from the post office and the D.M.V. I mean, these are government-run organisations that have the basic monopoly on what it is that they do. What makes you think that we’re going to—whether you “care” or not—I mean, I’m sure at one point somebody cared about delivering letters and somebody cared about providing people good customer service when they gave them driver’s licenses, and I’m even sure that there are probably people that work in the post office and the D.M.V. that care about their jobs; however, they’re surrounded by people who do not.
Ian Freeman:
That’s a good answer; I like that—the comeback on the D.M.V., the post office—because everyone can relate to that; everybody has stood in—most people at least—stood in a postal line and they’ve stood at the D.M.V. and they know.
Mark Edge:
All you have to do is look at what’s being proposed in the healthcare system is essentially a “public option” which means that there will then be private option also—
Ian Freeman:
You mean for insurance?
Mark Edge:
For insurance. Or, even if the government offers it there’s still going to be some private options, I’m sure.
Ian Freeman:
Until they’re put out of business.
Mark Edge:
Well, they’ll be driven upward or put out of business. And they’ll be driven—
Ian Freeman:
Upward?
Mark Edge:
In prices. In premium area.
Ian Freeman:
Yeah.
Mark Edge:
Just look at public schools. That’s all you have to do. Look at the teaching level of public schools versus private schools, look at the service level between public schools and private schools, look at everything and you will see the difference—the costs, the whole deal. I have to pay for public schools so I might as well send my kid there—until I have a problem with the public school, in which case the bureaucrat in the front office will tell you to pound salt into your butt because whatever it is that you want, you can’t have. “Go and vote, citizen, if you want to change things.”
Ian Freeman:
“Go run for the school board!”
Mark Edge:
Yeah, that’s all you can do, because if you want your kid to be taught a certain—you know, all the kids to be taught something or your kid to be taught something or whatever—
Ian Freeman:
Similarly if you want a sort of alternative treatment or you don’t accept what the health monopoly is giving you, I bet you’ll be told things like, “Well run for the health board, then you can change the policy!”
Mark Edge:
Yup, that’s exactly it.
Ian Freeman:
Instead of just being able to choose a different doctor, instead of being able to choose another expert to give you the advice, or to give you the product that you’re looking for, you’ll have to change policy.
Mark Edge:
I’m sure some bureaucrat over there in England right now has recently just told Miss Capewell—the woman whose son Jayden died basically in her arms, in her hands because he was so small—that, you know, if she doesn’t like the policy where they don’t help kids that aren’t twenty-three weeks old or older, then she should run for health board and get these things changed, to fix these problems around here.
Ian Freeman:
Right.
Mark Edge:
It’s going to take you your whole gosh-darn life to change one policy; rather than having the opportunity to choose. Screw choice, you won’t get choice.
Ian Freeman:
Well, right, that’s if she succeeds at her little campaign.
Mark Edge:
It’s not like plenty of people haven’t tried to change the government and failed—that’s where we got the saying “you can’t fight City Hall.”
00:17:00
A caller named Tyler called in at 00:17:00 to ask, “Why would it be so bad to try the policy that President Obama has offered, and if it doesn’t work, then we can, uh, scrutinise him, and….”
The hosts point out that the government never repeals a government programme once it’s been enacted, regardless of how much it fails. Mark Edge says, “Tell me the last government programme we stopped, that occured and then discontinued.” The caller had no answer. Ian Freeman correctly notes, “It doesn’t work that way.”
Mark explains why it’s so difficult to get rid of government programmes thusly: “The bureaucrats have jobs, they’re in the union, they’re not going anywhere.”
Ian Freeman suggests another reason why the programme should not be tried: “Because it’s stealing. Because government is force. Because government is a violent monopoly, it’s an agency of coercive force; and it’s never appropriate, no matter what your goals are, to steal in order to support something. If you want to get grandma an operation, it makes more sense to ask people to help you rather than to force them to; and that’s all government knows how to do, is force people.” Ian Freeman says he supports people getting the care they need, but that it “can be done on a voluntary basis.”
00:25:00
A caller named Matt called in at 00:25:00 to say that, in response to the U.K. government’s murder of innocent Jayden, perhaps the U.S. military should invade England. Of course, the caller wasn’t being serious, but rather was pointing out the irrationality of American foreign policy and of the neoconservative view that the united government of these fifty states should act as world police.
00:42:19
Ian Freeman:
We were talking about healthcare in the first hour of the programme, and toward the end of the first hour, a lady who was claiming to be a nurse—and I have no reason to disbelieve her there—but she said she’d been a nurse for a number of decades in the United States, and she’d seen a lot of changes; and in the beginning part of her call, she sounded like she was saying that she’d seen changes, she’d seen things get worse in the past couple of decades. But then toward the end of her call, she’d kind of shifted her message to, that she believed the government’s regulations were beneficial; and of course what we were talking about earlier—
Mark Edge:
She said “to some extent.”
Ian Freeman:
What we were talking about earlier, Mark, is that the government’s regulations is what’s killing the healthcare system; it’s what’s making the healthcare system so expensive and so difficult for people to afford. And, it’s killing innovation, and of course the more government involvement you get, as they’re proposing now in D.C., the worse things will become; so we propose the so-called “impossible solution” of getting the government completely out of healthcare, ending all the government benefit programmes, the mandates, the regulations, ending the F.D.A., ending it all, and allowing the market place to handle things.
But one of the things she said toward the end of her call was that she believes government regulations encourage the medical industry to “run a tighter ship!” Like, you know, “You need to do this, this, and this, and that’s a good thing.” And that’s a common misconception about government regulations: people believe that government regulations have a certain effect on businessmen, they believe that “Well, without government regulations, people will build shoddy houses; and without government regulations, you’d get shoddy service; if you hire a plummer, or without government regulations in healthcare, you know, people just won’t get taken care of as well. Because we need standards! Right?”
Mark Edge:
“Sure, because who doesn’t want standards?”
Ian Freeman:
It’s an illusion, though. And the reason it is an illusion is: Sure, sure, those businesses do have to obey the government regulations, else they’ll get in trouble and be fined—possibly thrown in cages if they don’t pay a fine—so it makes it seem like, “Well this must be good.” But what really happens is, the government regulations work in favour of the existing players in the system. This is what government regulations do across the board: it happens in healthcare, it happens in your local restaurant regulation board, it happens in the plumber’s regulations board—anywhere where there’s regulations being put down on business owners, it’s proposed and sold to the public as, “Hey, we’re here to help! We’re government regulators!” But what they really do is they insulate those business owners from competition in that every time a new goverment regulation comes out, it makes it more difficult to do business; it increases the costs of doing business.
Now, when you talk to healthcare workers, you can ask them, how much time do you spend doing paperwork? How much time do the people in your office spend doing paperwork? The amount of time is tremendous, and compared to a few decades ago, it’s huge; they didn’t have much paperwork to do a few decades ago.
Mark Edge:
Right, the levels of bureaucracy have been piled on and piled on, and the idea of employers providing insurance, which she mentioned, it sounds to us [American’s] just the most normal thing in the world: “Why wouldn’t employees, why wouldn’t the masters, take care of their servants, as has been done throughout the ages?” Well, actually, it didn’t used to be that way: for one, people could afford healthcare because the government wasn’t involved, and two, the insurance programmes that were offered by employers were offered because of the ninety-percent tax bracket that the government put on after a certain level of earning—employers couldn’t offer—and money wouldn’t incentivise you—every dollar they offered was a dime! So it didn’t incentivise people in the same way; so they had to offer things like, “Well, we’ll offer you medical care, we’ll give you dental care, we’ll give you optical care!” So the very fact that employers offer medical insurance in the first place—which is the reason that insurance companies are in healthcare today at all—everybody hates the medical insurance companies, they [people] say that they [the companies] have caused all the problems—no, it was the government that got them involved in the first place—
Ian Freeman:
They drove them the business.
Mark Edge:
—it’s the government in the first place every time.
Ian Freeman:
They’re working together with the insurers, and they’re working together with the doctors union, the AMA—these are organisations that are very interested in government regulations. Sure it makes their life more difficult, but it’s worth it to them to jump through these hoops and to support these regulations in order to keep other people from getting into the business, and competing, and innovating.
So, the reality is, government regulations are just a cover, they don’t encourage running a “tighter ship,” like she was saying, what they do—
Mark Edge:
But they do look like it.
Ian Freeman:
Right, they create the illusion that a “tighter ship” is being run, when, in point of fact, if there was an open marketplace, a free marketplace, in healthcare, the ships would be much tighter in general because you would have more competition. When you have more competition in the marketplace, people better run a damn tight ship, or else they’ll be run over by the competition! And they’re gonna get all the customers! And when I say competition, I mean, competition—the doctors have such an exclusive deal, the nurses (and if she were still on the line, she would probably be able to admit to this)—the nurses can’t do the same things doctors can legally. They know how, many of them; many of them have the training it takes to do some of the same procedures that a doctor does, but a doctor is legally the only one who’s able to actually perform some of these things. So in a free market—
Mark Edge:
And in some cases, the nurse can perform them, but a doctor to be—
Ian Freeman:
To be there!
Mark Edge:
—in the ward or something—as though a nurse is less competent when a doctor is not in the wing of the hospital.
Ian Freeman:
It’s just ludicrous. It’s a guaranteed business programme for the doctors, and it prevents nurses from effectively competing with the doctors to bring price down. So you could be able to, in a free marketplace, go and get treatment from somebody who’s a specialist at doing one thing, fixing a burn, or cuts, or whatever the heck it is they do, suturing things, whatever it is they do; or you could have a nurse who’d be willing to do something for less than a doctor would charge—she’s not as well-trained, perhaps, but she would be able to offer her services at a lower price; then you as a consumer would be able to take the risk and make the choice to do those things. In the government-regulated marketplace, you’re just not able to even make those choices; they’re not allowed to be offered in the first place.
Mark Edge:
Well, they are sort of allowed to be offered, but you still don’t get the choice; you don’t get to choose whether you want a doctor to take care of your broken arm, or a physician’s assistant, because, with the way healthcare costs have been driven up by government interference, now many emergency rooms now only have physician’s assistants with a doctor on duty.
00:49:04
A caller named David called in at 00:49:04 to make a correlation between unemployment and healthcare regulation. He also comments that healthcare is not an entitlement.
Mark Edge:
I think that even fewer of them would want it if they asked the question properly. Because I just took one of these polls, and they asked me if I’d like to see healthcare reform. I answered yes, because I would like to see healthcare reform; I just won’t want the president’s stinking, crappy healthcare reform. So you’ve got a real problem there: I’m answering yes, I do want healthcare reform; they’re interpreting that as, “I want the president’s programme.”
01:14:17
At 01:14:17, Ian Freeman explains that “charities would happily be picking up the ball for people that actually needed that help” that a caller was talking about. The caller conceded that Ian Freeman was right in his claim that the government doesn’t produce, and that the only money it has is that which it steals from other people.
Ian Freeman:
Look, Clair, if you look at the overhead of welfare programmes as compared to private charities that help people, the overhead is like a reverse picture. In a government programme, the overhead is, you know, sixty, seventy, eighty percent; in a private charity, the overhead is ten, twenty, thirty percent. So, you’ve got a completely different picture where, in a private charity, the money that you donate to that charity is actually being funneled to the people who actually need it, whereas in the government programme, most of the money that’s being stolen from you to pay for their programme is going to fund the lifestyles of the middle-class bureaucrats that run the programmes.
01:34:37
Gene the Christian anarchist called in at 01:34:37 to say that services are not rights, and that healthcare is a service.
Ian Freeman:
In fact, you have a tough time getting the best doctors [under a government-funded programme] because they’re not going to be compensated comensurate with their value in the marketplace because there will be no way to measure that because the government will be running the system; so, all of the prices, the amounts that doctors get paid, is completely arbitrarily set by a bunch of government bureaucrats instead of the marketplace between buyers and sellers coming to an agreement.
Ian explains that when a government gives an equal amount of money to all doctors regardless of the quality of their service, this will drive good doctors out of the market, thus decreasing the overall quality of healthcare.
Later, Ian and Mark discuss the greater degree of healthcare options that would be available if we had a more competative, less government-crippled healthcare system.
