Friday, September 08, 2006

The Economies of State-run Healthcare

NY State is getting into financial problems and Eliot Spitzer is saying that hospitals would have to close. NY is now paying for the sins of past politicans who promised government intervention into healthcare. NY is learning economics 101: As cost of something goes to zero, demand will skyrocket. NY also has a unique solution to the fact that illegals and bums walk into hospital emergency rooms for routine care and don't pay for anything: close the whole hospital!

So NY will be rationing of healthcare after all. Instead of using prices, NY will institute the rationing of service and quality.


BALDWINSVILLE, N.Y., Sept. 7— Attorney General Eliot Spitzer said on Thursday that if elected governor he would close hospitals and drastically cut spending in an effort to restore fiscal discipline to New York State.

Giving his most candid glimpse yet of his plans to put the state’s fiscal house in order, Mr. Spitzer said that to fulfill his pledge to cut property taxes he would have to take aim at the state’s health care system.

“We’re going to take the tough medicine,” he said at a campaign stop in this Syracuse suburb, adding: “I’m saying to folks this isn’t all milk and honey. These are going to be tough decisions. Nobody likes to hear that a hospital is going to close, or a wing of a hospital, or beds are going to be shifted, but that is what we have to do.” NY Times


UPDATE:

Michael Moore plans his next film on healthcare. In typical Moore fashion, he will take a few odd examples and make them the norm in order to showcase why national healthcare is wonderful, but he will ignore the multitude of problems which nationalized healthcare faces. I doubt he'll talk about people who have been denied service or been forced to wait months for service. An NHS doctor, writes a blog, in which he sometimes recounts his horror.


"The segments presented stories of personal health care nightmares, including that of a woman denied payment for an ambulance ride after a head-on collision because it was not preapproved.

"They try to find every way they can to deny it to you or not sell it to you," he told a packed theater. "Or they try to find anyway they can not to pay the bill." AP

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