Socialized medicine isn't performing well in Britain. Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit write:
Aggravated by the flu season, and budget constraints, the National Health Service cancelled some 50,000 "non-urgent" surgeries. The problem is that the urgency for a particular patient's surgery is, or should be, a doctor's clinical judgment. For example, surgery for a person to repair an abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA), for instance, may be delayed. But delaying an AAA repair is risking rupture, and patients with a ruptured AAA have a 90 percent mortality rate.
By March 2018, British emergency departments reached new lows, leaving 15.4 percent of patients waiting over four hours before being seen. This was far short of the goal of less than 5 percent of patients forced to wait over four hours.
When considering only major emergency departments, classified as Type 1 in the National Health Service, the rate increased to 23.6 percent of patients waiting longer than four hours to be seen. The British Medical Journal reports that this is the worst performance since 2004, when these metrics were first tracked.
Outside of emergency departments, the number of British patients waiting 18 weeks or more for treatment increased by 35 percent, which was an increase of 128,575 patients from about 362,000 patients in 2017, to over 490,000 patients in 2018.
Additionally, by March 2018, 2,755 patients had waited over a year to be treated, compared to 1,528 patients in 2017. In England, the National Health Service also broke records by canceling over 25,000 surgeries at the last minute in the first quarter of 2018—this was the highest number of last-minute cancellations in 24 years. Remarkably, this was after the British authorities initiated a series of reforms that started in 2016.
[Kevin Pham and Robert Moffit, "Britain's Inability to Handle Last Year's Flu Season Shows Perils of Socialized Medicine," The Daily Signal, August 13]
Socialism produced the crisis in Venezuela. Juan Carlos Hidalgo explains how a rich country came to experience hyperinflation and hunger:
[Hugo] Chavez dramatically increased the size of the government payroll and the reach of social programs. In fairness, patronage had been a common practice in Venezuela for decades. However, buoyed by more than $1 trillion in oil revenues during his time in office, Chavez took that practice to unprecedented levels. These social policies earned him popularity at home and plaudits from abroad — including from Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz — even though they were financially unsustainable. Today, an estimated 60 percent of Venezuelans are reportedly dependent on government handouts.
Chavez also nationalized and expropriated key industries, mostly in the agribusiness, commerce and food sectors. Driven by his ideological agenda, the government seized 1,168 enterprises and farms between 2002 and 2012. Most of them were run into the ground due to sheer incompetence, sleaze and negligence, decimating Venezuela's productivity. According to Fedeagro, the leading agricultural association, the country imports 75 percent of the food it consumes.
Economic controls also played a major role in the destruction of Venezuela's private sector. Currency and price controls were first introduced in 2003 when inflation and capital flight began to surge. At this point, the government became the sole official provider of dollars, a process that was characterized by cronyism and corruption. Countless businesses were starved of access to hard currency due to political reasons or lack of connections. Chavez also instituted harsh mandates on credit, ordering banks to channel an increasing share of their portfolio to mostly unviable pet projects. The tightening of price controls in 2011 and 2014 was the last nail in the coffin for many companies since it forced them to sell their products below production costs. This contributed to widespread shortages. […]
[F]or over two decades [PDVSA, the state-owned oil company] enjoyed administrative autonomy and built a reputation for efficiency and competence. That changed in 2003, however, when Chavez took over PDVSA, dismissed more than 18,000 of its most qualified employees, and replaced them with loyalists with little industry experience. Chavez weaponized PDVSA, using it to finance his social programs, prop up regional allies and invest in dubious schemes marred by widespread corruption. As a result, production has steadily declined since 2002. This phenomenon has further accelerated in recent years, with oil output in April falling to its lowest level since 1949.
[Juan Carlos Hidalgo, "Venezuela Is on the Verge of a Massive Humanitarian and Economic Collapse. The Culprit? Socialism." Cato Institute, August 10]
Abortion is not a source of prosperity. Chelsea Clinton recently claimed that legalizing abortion has added $3.5 trillion to the U.S. economy between 1973 and 2009. Michael New writes that her unseemly attempt to inject utilitarianism into a debate about fundamental rights turns out to be wrong on the facts:
[O]n Twitter, she cited a 2018 study by Diana Greene Foster that appeared in the American Journal of Public Health. This study was part of the abortion turnaway study which compared the life outcomes of women who obtained abortions to women who had sought abortions but were unable to obtain one because of gestational age limits. The study finds that women who were unable to obtain abortions were more likely to live in poverty in the short term. However, after a five year period, the poverty rates of women who carried their pregnancy to term were almost identical to the group of women who had first-trimester abortions. As such, this study provides no evidence to support Clinton's assertion that legalizing abortion created trillions in wealth. […]
Abortion, along with contraception, has made it more socially acceptable for men to abandon women they impregnate. This has resulted in more single parent families which tend to rely more on public services. Also, abortion, along with other factors, has reduced fertility rates in the United States. As a result, the United States has fewer workers and fewer wealth producers. Furthermore, falling fertility rates means that we have fewer workers supporting more retirees through Social Security, Medicare, and other programs. That will result in either higher deficits or higher taxes – neither of which is economically beneficial.
[Michael New, "No, Chelsea Clinton, Roe v. Wade Did Not Create $3.5 Trillion in Wealth," CNSnews.com, August 17]
Free trade is the freedom to trade. Ryan Young and Iain Murray provide a refresher on some basic principles:
Trade must be win-win, or else it would not occur in the first place. Trade is a positive sum proposition. People only agree to trade with each other when both expect to benefit. For one person to gain, it is not necessary for another to lose.
Countries do not trade with one another; people do. Trade is not a collective phenomenon; it is an individual one. When people in China trade with people in America, one country is not "beating" the other on trade. It means people in both countries are making mutually beneficial deals with one another. In that sense, all trade is balanced.
Trade deficits are worse than useless as a guide to policy. To illustrate, most of us run a persistent trade deficit with our local grocery store—we buy more from it than it buys from us—yet we all benefit from that trading relationship. Many Americans are happy to trade cash for goods, while many of our trading partners seek cash payments—so they trade with one another. Overseas dollars eventually return in the form of direct foreign investment.
[Ryan Young and Iain Murray, "Traders of the Lost Ark: Rediscovering a Moral and Economic Case for Free Trade," Competitive Enterprise Institute, August 15]
The Insider, Summer 2018. Our summer issue of The Insider magazine includes features on occupational licensing, North Korea, the good work of the Gloucester Institute, an interview with Nicholas Eberstadt, a discussion of school safety, and more. Check it out: The Insider, Summer 2018.
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