Milton Friedman - Socialized Medicine

Nobel Laureate Economist Milton Friedman explores the unsettling dynamics set into motion when government imposes itself into the health care system. (1978)

Source: Milton Friedman Speaks
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  News & Politics

[FeebleCrush]

1. Well of course, sometimes profits have to be made at the expense of others to innovate and create new solutions. 2. Where does the Government get the money to fund R&D and Univesities? Tax paying innovators that's who, basically we the people can create the best results and compete to get prices down and innovation up.

[Ciaran O'Connell]

That's a lousy excuse to have a market based healthcare system. Surely, you can come up with something better to justify a market based health system. You seem to think any medical advances must be solely driven by profit. In the vast majority of cases, it's actually the opposite. Just stumbled across by accident. As for technology, it's more often than not Universities & government funded research that yield results, not the private sector.

[FeebleCrush]

Look at the healthcare in Portugal, it's socialist to the core, and they are seriously lacking in medical technology, CT scans for example. There are not an adeqtuate enough of medical scanners per capita to supply the population, why? well because innovation is down in portugal because instead of having a market based healthcare system which encourages free market and innovative solutions they have a government run one.

[Dalton Ray]

If you don't trust private healthcare because of the fallibility of man you must also reject government healthcare for the same reason.

[ayhan bilgin]

mr bald head old.

being doctor is involved more than money.if one want to became a doctor ,he really wants to help people.

if one want to be doctor because of earning money ,will looks people's body as a money source.

do you doctor you choose?wants you to be healhty or just want your money(not care your health)

mr bald headed old man answer: suppose that you have not sufficient money to call doctor. what do you think when you having heart attack and afford to call doc and die (like you)?

[futuredoc17]

It's not that docs are motivated by money, you also have HMO's/MCO's which dictate a fixed amount of money in which require them to under- treat patients so they won't exceed the pre-determined set of money they had to work within. Europe spends less for the reasons I mentioned before - less environmental/health factors/less pop., but less quality/longer wait times/ high % of developing a disorder/illness etc. Also, you can't just compare countries with others - it's a multifactorial issue.

[Ciaran O'Connell]

America's health system is a horrible mess where it has the costs of both systems & very few benefits of either socialized medicine or free market health care. What I do know is that America spends 17-20% of it's GDP on health whereas Europe spends between 8-12% of its GDP on health. My original point was that while European health care has problems, the threat posed to the American health care system is a direct threat to it's fiscal future. I'm not advocating anything, just pointing facts.

[Ciaran O'Connell]

I think that if American doctors are purely motivated by money, then that's a sorry state of affairs. To become a doctor, something inside must have compelled them to feel that they have to help people. If the American system puts profit over care & has changed the very idea of what being a doctor is all about, then that's to be lamented & pitied.

[futuredoc17]

Also, not too mention the people will feel the effect - premiums will indefinitely rise considering health insurance has to cover pre-existing conditions, taxes will rise and most importantly - Medicaid will grow at a 7.2% rate compared to state growth at 3.2% growth rate - the whole idea of funding is implausible

[futuredoc17]

The only way for PPACA (obamacare) to work is to put a federal cap on spending for medicaid expansion while also giving block grants to states - but that also won't even work considering Canada uses block grants for healthcare - spending runs out early in the year - access for medicine decreases - wait time lasts up to 36 weeks until seeing a specialist. funding medicine is hard bcuz there's no formula to analyze the different illnesses of every person and be cost efficient.