Newsweek’s Howard Fineman reports on his experience with food poisoning in Argentina, noting he “got great care at a tiny fraction of what the cost would have been in the U.S.—even correcting for cost-of-living and currency values.”
Fineman concludes:
President Obama proclaims his plan (whatever it finally is) to be “reform.” But from what I can see, it would merely feed, at taxpayer expense, 30 million currently “uncovered” people into a wasteful system that doesn’t have either the price-signaling power of a marketplace or the sweeping overview and control of a state-run bureaucracy.
Either alternative might work; the latter surely does, at least in a highly centralized, communitarian country such as France. But what we have, and will have even if the president has his way, is a simmering mess of neither-here-nor-there.
Most Americans have no idea how much their health care really costs, nor do they know how well it really works, compared with, say other places, practices or countries.
Rush Limbaugh reacts to Fineman’s column. It’s a lengthy transcript, but the point Rush makes is “until we get back to a direct participation by the patient customer in the cost of the service, we’re never going to get costs down.”
It’s a point the John Locke Foundation makes time and again. Here’s JLF’s Joe Coletti.
