Unfortunately there comes a time in every persons life...
let it be resolved that universal health care is a bad idea
Having a market in health care doesn't mean that the poor wouldn't get care. We have a market in housing and a market in food, yet the poor don't starve or go homeless. Of course there are SOME people who are homeless but this isn't due to the market but due to government intervention in the market. Low cost housing is forbidden due to regulations ensuring all housing must be of a certain quality. The sort of housing a homeless person could afford is expressly illegal. And there are interventions in the labour market making it illegal to hire these people (the minimum wage). But I digree. Having a market in health care doesn't mean the poor would go without health care. Doctors are compassionate people. No doctor is going to see a sick person come to their hospital and say "nah, you're not rich enough, go die on the street". That's not how the world works. On the market, people would pay what they could afford, and if they couldn't afford it the doctor / hospital would donate their time and equipment. Government is the illusion that we can all live at the expense of someone else. Unfortunately there comes a time in every persons life that they realize they are the somebody else. That the pocket they are picking is their own. There's nothing free in this world. Everyone charges the government the max - as they should. But this greatly inflates the costs involved with health care. If doctors had to charge patients directly for most stuff, then they would charge the minimum and seek to find ways to reduce waste and lower costs. Government is always tremendously inefficient because no one spends someone else's money as carefully as they spend their own. Further what you have with socialized medicine is a government monospony. All health care services - with a few exceptions - are bought by the government. This means that no doctor needs to compete with lower costs. The end user isn't going to decide where to go based on how much it costs the government and so there is absolutely no incentive for the doctors to charge less than the absolute maximum. But eventually all of this needs to be paid for by taxpayers. You know what politicians in Canada do when they get sick? They hop on the first plane to the states because their wealth, stolen from the Canadian public, enables them to get the first class medical treatment they have made it illegal to provide here. Illegal. Yes, Canada is one of the only countries, along with Cuba and North Korea, that has made it a criminal for a doctor to sell their services to the consumer. That's right - we live in a country where a prostitute can legally sell his / her body, but a doctor is criminally liable if they sell their medical services. It's a messed up world we live in. Privatize everything!