In his latest column, Paul Krugman informs the country that the stories about bad health care in Britain are false. When you think about that for a moment, you realize that he’s claiming omniscience, at least with respect to British health care. He knows that there have been no instances whatever where people have had to wait too long and died, or had to resort to home remedies, or had to leave the country to find treatment elsewhere, or suffered from poor treatment because the NHS has to economize in order to keep to its budget.

The omniscient Krugman tells us that he knows all such stories to be false.

Don Boudreaux lets Krugman have it right between the eyes in this letter:

Editor, The New York Times
620 Eighth Avenue
New York, NY 10018

To the Editor:

Paul Krugman writes that “In Britain, the government itself runs the hospitals and employs the doctors. We’ve all heard scare stories about how that works in practice; these stories are false” (“The Swiss Menace,” August 19).

Curious. Here’s what Arthur Seldon, an English economist, wrote in 1998 about his country’s National Health Service: “The characteristic failure and political fiction of ‘free’ medicine is that for many people with the lowest incomes it has not been available when, where, or how it was wanted…. The further false claim that it offered the highest quality of medical care in the world was obscured by the widespread experience that it was ironically not available at all when it was most wanted. The plausible emphasis on priority or ‘acute’ cases did not obscure the anxieties, deterioration of symptoms, or the burden heaped on the families of the chronically sick.”*

Sincerely,
Donald J. Boudreaux
Chairman, Department of Economics
George Mason University
Fairfax, VA 22030

* Arthur Seldon, Government Failure and Over-Government, Vol. 5 of The Collected Works of Arthur Seldon (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2005), pp. 108-109.

But what would Seldon know. He only lived in Britain.