The greatest cost, argues Harvard professor Regina Herzlinger in this WSJ article is that we lose out on innovation.
That is already the case under the highly regulated status quo. Would we be likely to get more innovation or less if we let the Michael Moores and John Edwardses and Hillary Clintons have their way and lead us further into socialized health care? If you have a hard time answering that, ask yourself how much innovation — except in things geared toward the power and control of the government — came out of the Soviet Union. Or the Post Office. Or any institution where the incentive for improvement is destroyed by cutting the connection between payment and customer satisfaction.
Socialized medical care is another of those cases where the siren song of immediate equality leads to enormous long run losses.
