Posted by
BrianCrnobrnja on Sunday, February 25, 2007 8:28:39 AM
"We'll have to raise taxes. The only way you can pay for a
healthcare plan that cost anywhere from $90 to $120 billion is
there has to be a revenue source"
That's a line from Democratic presidential candidate hopeful John Edwards, upon unveiling his plan for universal health care. This is one of those pillars of socialism that will just not go away. As we get ourselves prepared for this debate once again, the proponents are already preparing their justifications and plans for funding this potential massive catastrophe.
What really stands out in this particular quote is that Edwards claims the plan will "cost anywhere from $90 to $120 billion". Promising that he can predict the cost to take care of well over 300 million people needs a thorough examination. Especially when Edwards is claiming he can predict the cost with only about 25% of wiggle room.
The problem with putting an accurate price tag on universal health care is there are too many unknowns. One could take the average amount of health care you would expect each individual to need for a given time period based on today's usage, and apply that average to the remaining population (approximately 47 million people). However, that won't work, because the health care people will demand when it's free will undoubtedly be greatly different than when there's a cost to it.
The flaw in the estimation of the cost of universal health care is one that most socialist ideas suffer from: you can never accurately measure the inevitable drastic shifts of the supply-demand balance when you remove the cost restraint from demand. No matter how badly people want to believe health care is a "birthright", the hard economic truth is that it is a scarce resource. Supply will not keep up with demand, and the result will be degraded quality of health care, and most likely still a lot of people not receiving health care at all. And perhaps the worst consequence: the unpredictable cost of it all, to be paid for (unwillingly) by the producers, for the intended benefit of the non-producers.