Med anledning av Michael Moores nya propagandafilm Sicko, vill jag uppmärksamma ett gäng artiklar. Den första är ”Health Care Is Not A Right” av Leonard Peikoff. Den andra är ”No Right to ‘Free’ Health Care” av Onkar Ghate.

Den tredje är ”Michael Moore’s Sickness” av Rick Lowry. Ett utdrag:

Cuban health care works only for the select few: if you are a high-ranking member of the party or the military and have access to top-notch clinics; or a health-care tourist who can pay in foreign currency at a special facility catering to foreigners; or a documentarian who can be relied upon to produce a lickspittle film whitewashing the system.

Ordinary Cubans experience the wasteland of the real system. Even aspirin and Pepto-Bismol can be rare, and there’s a black market for them. According to a report in the Canadian National Post: ”Hospitals are falling apart, surgeons lack basic supplies and must reuse latex gloves. Patients must buy their sutures on the black market and provide bed sheets and food for extended hospital stays.”

How could it be any different when Cuba embarked on a campaign of economic self-sabotage with the revolution of 1959? It went from third in per capita food consumption in Latin America to near the bottom, according to a State Department report. Per capita consumption of basic foodstuffs like cereals and meat actually has declined from the 1950s. There are fewer cars (true of no other country in the hemisphere), and development of electrical power has trailed every other Latin American country except Haiti.

But the routine medical care, we’re supposed to believe, is superb.

Den fjärde är ”Michael Moore’s Shticko” av Michael C. Moynihan. Ett utdrag:

Sicko also introduces us to Diane, whose brain tumor operation was initially denied by Horizon BlueCross because it didn’t consider her condition ”life threatening.” She eventually received treatment, but ”not without battling the insurance companies,” Moore says.

Jack Szmyt found himself in a similar situation. After waiting two months for his initial diagnosis—he too had a brain tumor—Szmyt was told that it would be another month until doctors could start the necessary treatment. Rather than wait in a queue, he borrowed $30,000 from a friend, and flew to a private clinic in Germany. Had he not sought private treatment abroad, his German doctor said, he would likely have died. When contacted by the media, his insurer, again the Swedish government, said it didn’t consider the assigned waiting period ”unreasonable.”

Such examples suggest that Moore’s depiction of European-style medicine as an easy panacea for America’s problems is rather more complicated than presented.

Den femte är What is Interventionism?” av George Reisman. Denna artikel är visserligen lång, men väldigt nyttig att läsa. Om ni är för lata bör ni i varje fall läsa detta utdrag som behandlar just sjukvård.

[T]he government imposes medical licensing, which keeps down the supply of physicians and artificially increases their rates, making their services unaffordable by people who otherwise could have afforded them. Then, in an effort to alleviate this problem, it encourages employer-financed medical ”insurance” so-called, which has the effect of making the cost of medical care seem virtually free to growing numbers of workers. This is a system which should be understood not as any actual kind of insurance, but as the collectivization of medical costs. Because of the lack of cost of medical care to the individual under this arrangement, the demand for medical services begins to grow without limit.

Physicians cash in on the system by ordering more and more tests and procedures that may be of some benefit to their patients, but which they would not have ordered if they knew the patients themselves would have to pay for them and could not afford to do so. Soon physicians become exposed to malpractice suits for failing to order such tests and procedures and even for taking a patient’s financial circumstances into account at all. They then begin practicing ”defensive medicine,” ordering still more tests and procedures in order to protect themselves from such suits. And malpractice insurance premiums grow ever higher.

In this process, the cost of medical care is driven beyond the reach of more and more people who lack so-called medical ”insurance.” To deal with this problem, the government goes on to establish the programs of ”Medicare” and ”Medicaid.” The effect of these programs is to drive up the costs of medical care still further and to expose anyone who remains outside the system of so-called medical ”insurance” to financial ruin should he need any significant medical care.

Finally, in order to limit the rise in costs, the government more and more seizes control of what doctors and hospitals are allowed to do and how they are to do it. This is the point we are at today in medical care.

Slutligen vill jag tipsa om en väldigt bra hemsida som heter Free Market Cure. Där kan man hitta massor av fakta och statistik som kan vara intressant och användbar. Det finns inte bara en del bra artiklar där, det finns dessutom fyra kortfilmer som argumenterar för sjukvårdskapitalism och mot den sjukvårdssocialism som Michael Moore förordar.

UPPDATERING: Jag kom på två andra artiklar som jag också skulle vilja rekommendera. Nämligen ”Socialized Medicine Is Wrong For Colorado” av Paul S Hsiesh och ”Health Care’s A Mess–So What’s the Solution?” av Michael J Hurd.