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Dec. 18, 2005 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:34
18 Health Care Part 1

An analysis of the power structures of socialized medicine

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Well, good evening.
My name is Stephan Molyneux.
It is Sunday night on the December 18th, 2005.
Thank you so much for taking the time to download and listen to this podcast.
I'd like to have a little chat about a little topic called health care.
Now I know that our friends down in the States have a slightly different situation insofar as I think it's only about 50 cents on the dollar that is spent in the healthcare arena is spent by the government but you know there are you know tens of thousands of regulations and You know, HMOs and insurance cartels and the hand of state power is everywhere in the US healthcare system.
So you have a combination of institutionalized private profit with public money, which is sort of, in a sense, the worst of both worlds, right?
I mean, you have a public person, a private profit.
And so there is that additional problem of escalated health costs, which we see as a result.
Here in the fabulous socialist snow land of Canada, we have, I think along with North Korea and Cuba, one of the few systems in the world where you can't get your health care provided to you privately.
It's absolutely illegal.
Well, except for dentistry and certain elective things.
Fertility treatments also you have to pay for privately and psychotherapy.
Anyway, the general rule is that it's provided by the government and to charge for it privately is illegal with, you know, about 500 different exceptions.
In other words, the people who couldn't lobby the government hard enough to have themselves included in the general health care bill.
Now, I'm not going to talk about health care tonight from the argument for morality, because if you've had a listen to these podcasts before, I'm sure you're completely fluent in applying the argument for morality to the question of health care.
But what I think would be interesting would be to have a look at health care and analyze it as a power structure you know analyze it as a tool of the state to expand its power and I think that is a very interesting approach because I think it gives us some understanding as to sort of what's behind all of the kindly propaganda of our good friends at the government and get a stronger sense of what they're actually up to and again I'm not sitting there saying that there's this cabal of you know
sort of gray-faced guys who sit in the back room choking on cigar smoke and you know drawing whiteboards up of how to enslave the population.
I mean the interesting thing about power is that the expansion of power is instinctual to human nature.
I mean you see this in the playground, you see this with parents.
You know you've got parents who've not even finished grade six who are able to skillfully manipulate their children into obeying them, obeying their irrationalities because The power, the desire, the ability to deploy power for personal gain is strongly embedded in the human psyche.
It's one of the reasons why it's so dangerous to have something like a government.
Because, you know, there's sort of three ways to survive, I mean, in biology.
The first way is is you produce your own food.
The second way is that someone voluntarily gives you food.
And the third way is you, somebody sort of involuntarily, you steal or you take or you bully someone into giving you food.
And so each one of these are perfectly viable strategies from a biological standpoint and as human beings we kind of have the capacity to go, in my view, to go just about any which way.
So, you know, I mean those of us who are sort of have honor and integrity produce And those of us who at certain times in our life, like, you know, if your wife is pregnant, you don't ask her to bring the vacuum cleaner downstairs and you probably would be more than happy to bring her breakfast in bed as she gets along.
So, you know, there are times when people are more than happy to give you sustenance even though you're not working for it directly yourself.
And, of course, children are the key example of this.
And, of course, in the third instance, right, the predatory sort of hunter side of human nature is where we Just take things and, you know, to heck with the consequences.
And, you know, I mean, that's obviously immoral.
And it's something that the government is very good at.
So when I say that this is an analysis of power and how the healthcare system sort of flourishes, or the power behind the healthcare system flourishes, I'm not suggesting in any way, shape, or form that there's a big cabal of people who sit and plan it all, but just that human beings are very good at imposing power on other people.
I mean, it's just part of the magic biology that got us where we are today, and it's a part of human nature that makes the existence of the state, you know, always so destructive.
So I'm going to chat just a little bit about, and this is by no means exhaustive, but I'm going to chat just very briefly about sort of five stages that governments go through when they are gathering power to themselves.
And I mean, anybody familiar with U.S.
history will know that there's some validity to this.
I mean, I don't claim it to be all inclusive, but this is sort of ideas that have struck me.
Government power, and let's just start from a very minimalistic government power scenario like, you know, after the American Revolution and the foundation of the Constitution and so on, so the sort of late 18th century.
The first thing that governments do is they offer protection.
So protectionism becomes very popular among governments because you get a lot of money, time and energy poured into your candidacy and your government through industrial concerns that will benefit from some sort of protectionistic racket that you're able to subsidize their economic growth.
through the general and slightly imperceptible impoverishment of the general population.
So, protectionism is sort of the first thing that happens.
Now, when the government begins to gather some money from protectionism, then it begins to focus its energies on protectionism in the realm of education.
Obviously everybody understands that if you get somebody to listen to all your propaganda when they're very young, you know as organized religion has known for tens of thousands of years, the younger you get to someone the more likely they are to believe everything that you say and believe it for the rest of your life.
And this is of course especially true if you inject them with a huge amount of moral moral ideas, moral fantasies, then you've got them for life.
So the government generally starts to angle its protectionistic abilities towards the protection of teachers, right?
So it begins to say to teachers, you know, we'll protect you, but in return, you know, we'd really like your support of government education.
So I think it was in the 1880s in America that this sort of came about.
Now, simultaneous with, or shortly subsequent to, the establishment of a state educational system, of course the bills for that are pretty high, and you don't necessarily want to start taxing people that heavily right away, right?
You always want, I mean, I absolutely guarantee you, every single government program from welfare to health care to warfare, You get a lot of people signed up very quickly, and you for sure never hit the general population with the taxes to pay for it right away.
My god, what a disaster that would be!
Because it's soon enough.
If you hit people with the taxes right away, then it's soon enough after the program starts to actually end it.
And you sure as heck don't want that possibility.
So what you want to do is you want to get a program going and get a lot of people signed into it, get it heavily embedded, get a bureaucracy going, get people to sort of move and settle in and get their careers going in this particular area.
And you want to fund all of that without raising taxes.
Because if you say, we're going to have state education, and then everyone's tax bill goes up by like 600%, then they're probably going to say, you know, this is a really bad deal.
So they then would say, well, we're not paying these taxes, and you would never get the chance to get your program going and get it to stay.
So what you want to do is get a big program going.
You want to borrow the money.
You want to put 25-year bonds out there.
You want to print money.
You want to do whatever you can to avoid the population getting hit with the bill The moment the program starts, otherwise your program is going to be in real jeopardy.
Once it's been in for five years or ten years, I mean, there's just no way people are going to be able to dislodge it without any civil war.
So by then, you can start to let the taxes hit the people, and there's really nothing that they can do.
Also, they're probably a little bit wealthier by this point, so the longer you can push off taxes, the better.
So, simultaneous to the creation of an educational state system, you also want to get control of the money supply, right?
You want to have a national bank, you want to make sure that you eliminate any competitors to the printing of money, and you want to discourage the use of hard currencies like gold, for sure.
So, you want to make sure that you gain control of the currency.
And this, of course, did happen somewhat simultaneous to or shortly after the institutionalization of state education.
In the 1880s So then you have two fabulous ingredients for the growth of power, right?
You have children trained in the quote virtue of the state from the age of six years old to the age of you know 10 or 15 or you know 18 or whatever so these people aren't really going to give you any trouble because you've really Conditioned them to to experience the state as a sort of benevolent Vaguely positive authority figure and there's no violence involved.
Of course.
It's not like the teachers are Grabbing their parents by the neck and holding a gun to their temple to get them to pay their taxes the children don't see that at all and of course I do believe that it's pretty common.
It's pretty common facet of human nature That it's very hard to criticize The agency that's paying you, right?
And in particular, if you have teachers paid by the state, they really can't talk about the violent and corrupt nature of state power, because then the students are going to look at them like, excuse me, you're telling me that the state is an evil entity and taxation is violence, but aren't you paid by the government?
You know, it's really hard to have, I think, moral authority If you're a government educator, if you then talk about the reality of state power.
It's one of the reasons why the state wants a public educational system so badly.
So, you know, to pay for the public educational system, down the road you want to make sure that you can print the money to pay the teachers for a couple of years.
So you get control of the central banking and you get a monopoly on the currency so that you can start to put all these financial tricks together.
And then you kind of have to be patient for probably 15 to 20 years, but then you have a group of your first generation of people who've been raised in state schools, and you also have, you know, all the fun tricks that central control of the money supply can give you.
So you can start to really borrow against the future tax receipts that you can provide You can print money.
You can create long-term bonds.
You can do all of the financial tricks that begin to accumulate and defer debt to the next generation.
That's pretty juicy stuff.
That's the kind of stuff you really need.
No petty limitations of numerical facts.
You want to have all of the sky-high spending sprees that you can think of.
So, once you have public school educated children and you have basically an infinite cash box to work with, then you can start to look at the real beauty of state expansion of power, which is war.
And of course it's no accident that, you know, within a generation and a half or two generations, actually about a generation and a half, of the introduction of the state educational system and the grabbing of the currency by the state, you had the First World War.
I mean, the First World War, without getting to a very strong or deep economic analysis of it, would be absolutely impossible without government control of the money supply, because you simply couldn't afford it.
I mean, the war was so destructive.
Ten million people died.
It went on for four and a half years.
Absolutely unprecedented in human history for this level of destruction to occur.
And it could only occur because the governments could borrow money.
And of course they were dealing with people who'd been trained by the government so they weren't real good at questioning power and authority.
Now another great thing that comes out of a war for the government, I mean aside from All of the wartime controls over the economy, which I'm sure you're all fairly familiar with.
Another great thing that comes out of a war for the government is an enormous amount of crippled people and destroyed families.
So once you have control of the money supply and you've managed to get a war going, Then you gather enormous amounts of power over the economy, but also you have to tax more people and set up a welfare state program because you have all these people coming home with no legs and no eyes and no arms and so on.
And you also have, of course, Millions or tens of millions in Europe of children who now have no fathers, right?
So what this does is it requires that you set up some sort of welfare state and of course this is what we see going on in Europe throughout the 20s and the 30s and it's one of the things that caused the Great Depression and caused it to elongate and so on.
So, then, once you have control of the money supply, state-educated children, you have a welfare state, old age, you have pensions for people who've been damaged in wars, then you can start to move into health care, right?
I mean, in the Western economies this generally occurred after the Second World War.
I've always found it ironic that You know, England, you know, spends millions of lives and trillions of dollars fighting the National Socialists and then in 1948, socialized medicine.
I mean, I've just always found that to be, I mean, so ironic it almost makes you cry.
But it certainly is a pretty interesting fact of history that you fight these socialists and then impose socialism on your own population as a victory, right?
So then the question for me becomes, I mean you could spend weeks on each of these topics, but the question for me then becomes, you know, why healthcare?
I mean it could be anything, right?
And you'll notice it's never farming.
It's never the production of food.
It's never the production of houses.
It's always a particular sequence.
And so I'd like to talk about why healthcare and how the government justifies it.
Well, there's some interesting facets to health care.
One is that it is uncertain, it's unknown, how much money you're going to need and when in your life for health care.
And, of course, the costs can be fairly high.
So, I mean, I've been very lucky.
I've almost never been sick.
I've never spent a night in a hospital.
I mean, I got some stitches when I was a kid.
I've never broken a bone.
I've led an active life and I mean I go to the gym four times a week and I you know I eat well and so on but you know a lot of people do that and still get sick so you know for me to have bought health care I'm 39 you know for the past 20 years would have been a waste of money but of course there's no way to know that right I mean you get hit by a bus tomorrow so to speak So, you know, it's uncertain how much money you're going to need, and the amount of money you're going to need is not inconsequential.
And also, it tends to be the case that you need the most money with health care when you are the least able to earn it, right?
So that's another aspect that's interesting.
I mean, if you don't take out house insurance and your house gets stolen, your house gets robbed, you can still go to work.
So you can, you know, it's a blow, but it's not the end of the world, right?
But if you suddenly develop some sort of very serious illness, well, you know, guess what?
You're not able to put in 40 hours at the office anymore.
So, you know, it's unknown.
It's a high cost and it's going to hit you when you can't, when you can least afford to pay bills.
And of course, you're not going to be able to get a new job if you have a long-term ailment.
So I think it's this combination of things that makes health care such a juicy topic for governments to get into.
Because people are kind of scared of it, right?
I mean, and of course there are some health issues that people bring about themselves.
You know, I don't think it's an accident that, you know, a generation after the introduction of socialized medicine throughout most of the Western countries, obesity is rising enormously.
I mean, because people's behavior changes, right?
If people aren't paying for their own costs for obesity, but they're passed on to these others, right?
What's that great quote?
Government is a fiction by which everybody attempts to live at the expense of everybody else.
Then, you know, this is what's going to happen.
You're going to change people's behavior by subsidizing their mistakes.
So some things people do to themselves, and other things just happen to you, right?
I mean, you can get lung cancer if you're not a smoker, right?
You can get, you know, hit by the bus.
You can give birth to a child who has some sort of congenital defect or deformity.
And, you know, pretty expensive stuff, right?
You can turn out to have infertility issues.
There's lots of things that can go on, which you can't predict, which are going to cause you to have some pretty exciting financial times when it comes to health care.
So, given that it's sort of a scare topic, you know, it's one of the things that governments love to get involved.
But I think that there are sort of two main reasons that governments are so well able to exploit people's fear to socialize their health care.
One is that health care costs are never or almost never absolutely imminent.
And what I mean by that is you can postpone getting a triple bypass if you want.
And, you know, in general, in life, you're probably never going to need one.
And if you do, it's going to be in your 50s.
But even after you get some sort of diagnosis of a cardiac problem, then you can postpone these things.
You can't postpone eating.
Right?
In Canada, for sure, you can't postpone finding shelter in winter.
You can't say, well, I'll pick up a house next year because, you know, it can get kind of chilly in those bus shelters.
So, health care is postponable in a way that sort of eating, drinking, and shelter is not.
And so one of the things that the governments always love to do is they love to get involved in things where the problems are just so far down the road that people just can't really see the correlation, right?
In religious matters, this is sort of analogous to, if I say to you, if you believe in my God, you will get a million dollars tomorrow.
Right?
Then, you know, suppose I find the odd lunatic who wants to believe.
That guy immediately is going to see the next day, hey, I don't have a million dollars.
I guess that God isn't real.
Right?
So in all power systems or all exploitive systems, the correlation between sort of subsidy and payoff has got to be as far apart as possible.
So, of course, the religions which have lasted are the ones who, you know, okay, you give me money, you come to church on Sunday, you know, you baptize your kids, you, you know, cut their foreskin off or whatever, and, you know, you're part of this great club, and when do you get your reward?
After you die!
So, it's completely unverifiable, of course, and that's exactly how it has to be.
So the greater the gap between the spending and the quote reward, the better off, the more you're able to exploit people.
So the government loves things like education, right?
I mean, what happens to a society when you educate people poorly?
Well, you know, there's this lag because the previous generation was better educated and You know, it just slowly degrades over, you know, 40 or 50 or 60 years.
You know, every generation gets a little bit dumber and, you know, you can always turn to your good friends in the pharmaceutical industry to dope any kids who are getting restless because of the terrible education.
You know, they love education because they can screw up your children and, you know, it's really hard to tell.
Why is Junior having such bad problems?
Well, you know, it could be because they were taught all this ridiculous stuff in kindergarten, like, ten years ago.
I mean, who the heck can make that connection?
You know, maybe a very trained psychologist, but, you know, just about nobody else.
And of course politicians are thinking about, you know, who can I reward today and punish tomorrow?
They're not thinking about what the state of society is going to be in 40 years.
I mean, who is, right?
Maybe you and me and my wife and that's about it.
So they love to get involved in these things where the The payoff is so far down the road that it really can't be traced, right?
So they love things like protectionism, right?
Protectionism, you know, where you block, you know, there's some sweater manufacturer who gives you $50,000 for your campaign on the understanding that you're going to block sweaters from coming in from overseas so that he can sell his for more.
That's great!
You get an immediate benefit and the problem down the road that every sweater is now $3 more expensive, you know, in five years.
I mean, nobody can figure that out, right?
So, I mean, that's the kind of stuff the government loves to get into.
Education, we've talked about.
Corruption of the money supply is also a famous place for government to get its corruption in because it gets the immediate benefits of printing all the money it needs and wants.
And, you know, when does the problem show up?
Well, you know, kind of 15 years from now or 12 years from now, now that the market's getting a little smarter and figuring out that printing of money causes inflation, it's getting a little bit shorter, which is why the governments don't do it as much.
That plus, of course, they were paying so much interest on their own national debts that it was crippling the amount of money they could use for bribes.
So the government loves getting involved in the money supply and health care is another perfectly logical place for the government to show up because, you know, you're pillaged for taxes your whole life and then, you know, when you absolutely need it, there's a number of factors which make it pretty hard to arrange and you're not in much of a position to argue, right?
So the fact that it's postponable is very important.
The reason that the government doesn't get involved in things like food production is because food production is not postponable.
You know, the two great starvations of the 20th century in Mao's China in the 1950s and Stalin's Russia or the Soviet Empire in the 1930s.
I mean, you could I guess talk about Cambodia as well.
These, you know, social genocides were entirely the result of governments getting into the food production business, right?
And the shelter production business, so you have tens of millions of people starving to death.
You know, there's a vivid story that I remember about the Chinese famine where this woman's grandparents had to eat the stuffing from their pillows.
You know, they ate rope.
They ate shoe leather, literally, to try and stay alive.
Anything that might have any kind of calorie or protein in it.
They would just gnaw on anything.
You know, this is where you have parents eating children that have died because they're just so ridiculously hungry.
I mean, who can blame them, right?
And so, when governments get involved in things like food production, then you have this kind of catastrophe, which tends to bring down the government, right?
So, because the relationship between the investment and the payoff is too close, you want it to be 10, 15, 20 years away, at the minimum, right?
So the governments have learned a little bit from the experiences of this sort of collectivization of farms.
And have sort of said, OK, well, we'll leave that stuff sort of to the private sector.
I mean, I know that there's lots of farm subsidies and so on, but more importantly, the distribution and delivery of food is almost entirely privatized because governments know if they get involved in that, they'll just starve the whole population and bring the whole mess down.
You know, same thing with shelter.
I mean, if the government was responsible for providing shelter to everyone, you know, we'd all be freezing in our cars, right?
Assuming the government wasn't providing cars as well, in which case we'd be freezing in a snowbank.
So health care, because it's postponable, is sort of one factor.
Another factor that I think is very important in terms of why the government gets so involved in health care is that, holy, when you need health care, you are in no position to argue.
That is so essential as to why the government uses it so consistently to exploit the general population.
And, of course, there is this great terror that if you do argue, it's going to negatively impact your relationship with your doctor.
So, once the government gets a monopoly on health care, what happens is you kind of cruise along, and you cruise along, and you grumble about your taxes, and maybe you go and get a checkup, or a flu shot, or whatever.
But it's nothing, right?
Nothing.
I pay, I think of my taxes, I pay about nine thousand dollars a year towards the health care system.
And I've used, like, fifty bucks of that my whole life.
I mean, it's ridiculous, right?
So, so far, you know, I'm in the hole for, like, half the price of my house compared to the benefits that I've gotten out of it.
But I grumble and I grumble and I grumble and blah blah blah.
So then, let's say tomorrow, I get terribly sick and I have, you know, cancer of the prostate or something.
And I go and see my doctor, and the doctor says, oh, you know, you, sorry, Mr. Molyneux, gosh, it's just terrible.
You know, there's a huge waiting list, the specialists are backed up, it's going to take you six months to get an exam by, you know, a qualified expert.
Now, this sounds ludicrous, but it's not.
I mean, a friend of mine's father, one of my favorite people in the whole world when I was growing up, just a wonderful, wonderful man, was diagnosed, was misdiagnosed.
I mean, he had all the symptoms.
They finally figured it out by looking it up on the internet.
Completely misdiagnosed, and then no longer got treated, or did not get treated until it was too late, and he died.
Within about a year.
And, I mean, just absolutely heartbreaking.
And everybody has these stories who's had any experience with socialized medicine.
I mean, I know this happens in the States, too.
And there is no such thing as a perfect health care system.
But, I mean, boy, you really want to see some horror.
Just spend some time talking to people who've had a lot of experience in a socialized health care system.
So, let's say my doctor then says to me, oh, Steph, you know, gee, I'm so sorry.
It's going to be like six months or whatever till you can see a specialist, right?
Well, do I jump up on the table?
Do I thump my fist down and say, by God, this is unacceptable!
If you don't get me into a specialist within a week, you know, well, what?
What am I going to say?
If you don't, I'm going to, what, key your car?
I mean, call you names?
Insult your wife?
I mean, what the hell can I do?
Nothing!
There's nothing that I can do.
I'm absolutely and completely at the mercy of a system that I never approved, have been pillaged for financially my whole life, and now I have absolutely no voice as a consumer.
None whatsoever.
So, I mean, I can report him, but what's that going to do?
Everybody knows that the waiting times are really long.
So I think that the other thing that the government always wants to do is it wants to take power in areas where it doesn't have an immediate and direct effect on the population.
So old age pension, welfare, education, health care and so on.
All the stuff that's kind of vague and postponable and later-ish.
They want that for sure.
And they also want to take money from you so that you're not able to fend for yourself.
And then, when you do need it, whatever they're working with, they want you to be as vulnerable as humanly possible when you need the service, so that you can't kick up a fight and argue, right?
So of course children are incredibly vulnerable.
I think far more vulnerable than people generally suppose.
So you nail them when they're kids in the educational system and you teach them poorly and nobody can fix it.
The parents can't do anything.
So they get you there, right?
And of course parents need a place to send their kids every day because the taxes are so high that two people have to work.
So, you know, if your little Johnny doesn't get along with the teacher and has problems, you know, because the educational system is so stupid, then, you know, that person, that kid can be kicked out of school, you know, or drugged.
When kicked out of school, what are you going to do?
Right?
Suppose you're a single parent.
Well, that's it.
Your life is kind of over, right?
Because you can't go to work.
Or if you're a double income parent, What are you going to do if your kid comes home?
Well, one person has to kind of quit working, which means that you've got to, you know, move out of your neighborhood and, you know, anywhere.
I mean, I'm sure you get the idea that they want to make sure that you're never in a position when you can complain, when you actually ask for a penny back on the dollar you've given them over the years.
So, that's one side of it.
Old age pensions, of course, a fantastic example of, you know, how to nail people when they're vulnerable.
My mother was on disability for mental illness for, I guess, a number of years.
Well, she has been for about, oh lord, close on two decades now.
And they still keep cutting off her checks.
I mean, it's astounding.
You know, she's not somebody who can competently take care of her own affairs, but she's not exactly somebody who's going to lead a political movement in opposition to the current structure of power, so then nail her that way.
I mean, this happens with people who are unemployment insurance and so on all the time.
That, you know, they'll nail you whenever they've got you at a vulnerable position.
They'll just nail you.
Happens in healthcare all the time.
Old age pension all the time.
I mean, if you're completely dependent upon your social security check or your CPP, what are you going to do?
Are you going to start kicking up a fuss?
Don't we all have within us the vague fear that if I kick up a fuss, somehow my file is going to get misplaced or I'm going to get cut off?
Or, you know, I mean, basically once they've got you dependent on them, What are you going to do?
You kick up a fuss and that could be it for you.
There's nothing, in no way is this ever more true than in the healthcare system.
I mean, you go in to an illness, sorry, if you need a specialist's attention, you know, they can just tell you the specialist is not available.
I mean, there's nothing you can do.
The specialist might misdiagnose you if you're too problematic.
He might just ship you off to another specialist so that you can make the rounds and generate a lot of money.
I mean, you have no control over any of this.
You're completely helpless.
You're completely dependent.
You have no options.
You have no savings because they've taken all your money in taxes.
So what are you going to do?
Well, you're going to shut up, and you're going to nod your head, and you're going to have your hat in your hand, and you're going to shuffle around and do whatever they tell you to.
Because you have no power in this absolutely most essential area of your life.
You have no power and no control.
I mean, if there's ever a time when you need to be an informed consumer with rights and powers, it is in your healthcare environment.
And you have none of that in a socialized healthcare system.
And you have none of that when you're on Medicare or Medicaid.
And that's another reason why the governments want to corner this aspect of the market.
Now, another aspect.
I guess this is a little more true in Canada than it is in the United States, but, you know, give it 10 or 15 years, you'll be in the same boat.
They talk about that there's these sort of scare, scare words that they use, right?
And one of the words that they use up in Canada is what's called a two-tier health care system.
At the moment we have, supposedly, we have a one-tier health care system where everybody gets the same treatments and nobody gets, you know, preferential anything.
What they always then say is, oh, well, you know, if you allow for the private sector to begin to take over, certain aspects of the healthcare system.
You are going to drain resources out of the public healthcare system.
You are going to drain talent out of the public healthcare system.
So then you're going to end up with rich people able to go to their private clinics, I guess in gated communities with mines and alligator ponds around it to make sure the riffraff don't get in.
And those people will get excellent healthcare.
And the poor schmoes who are left in the rest of the public healthcare environment will have to do with, you know, the leftovers and the crap and so on.
And so that's, you know, one of the things that's always talked about here.
What's an interesting thing that's occurred over the last couple of months is that I think it's a French lawyer in Quebec, which is our French-speaking or pseudo-French-speaking province.
He took the... I think he took it all the way to the Supreme Court.
to say basically that if you say to people that we are your health care monopoly provider and then you don't provide health care in any kind of timely manner that you know that is basically an assault on their person and so you know you have to start either letting them buy it privately or You have to begin providing it in a timely fashion.
Now, because we're in, you know, the election time, right?
I mean, nobody pays any attention to what the people say, except at election time, when the government deigns to begin frightening us with its propaganda.
So, of course, you get these ridiculous things coming out now, where... Actually, I'll just read one of these things to you, which I just think is very funny on a number of different levels.
So you can let me know what you think of this.
So Ontario is a province, right?
Some of the biggest province in terms of economy and population in Canada.
So Ontario, this is an article from the Toronto Star, Ontario sets own weight target.
Ontario is setting out maximum times patients should wait for cancer surgery, MRIs and CT scans.
The limit is 12 weeks for cancer operations and 4 weeks for MRIs and CT scans with treatment in shorter time frames depending on the severity of the patient's population.
But just how soon Ontarians can expect hospitals to meet those standards established by committees of doctors and bureaucrats is up in the air.
I can't exactly answer that question yet, Health Minister George Smitherman said yesterday.
He acknowledged there is no deadline for meeting the targets, no penalties for letting patients languish longer than the maximums, and no additional funding.
I mean, isn't that just delicious?
I mean, the way that these people speak to us, I mean, I really do believe that farmers speak more nicely to their chickens and cows than we are spoken to.
I mean, it's such a transparent ruse to get people to believe stuff, but there are some subtleties here that may not sort of grab you at first glance, which I'll point out.
And I guess the first one is, Twelve weeks wait for this and four weeks wait for that and so on.
Let's say that tomorrow, you know, Mr. Smitherman could put on his magic health care gloves and snap his fingers and achieve these goals.
Well, I guess then it would be a rather interesting fact that he could achieve these goals at the snap of a finger for all of the people who say had relatives die because those goals weren't met for the past twenty or thirty years.
I mean, can you imagine if they're actually able to achieve these wait times in a socialized environment, but they just kinda chose not to do it for the past thirty years?
I mean, my God, there would be a torch-bearing, picket-wielding, pitchfork-wielding mob going up to this guy's house and saying, what the hell?
Why didn't you just do this before?
And of course, the answer is that it couldn't be done before and it's not going to be done now.
One of the things that they've talked about here is that the 12 weeks, let's say, we'll just pick on the 12-week one, the 12-week one is only after you are diagnosed.
I mean, of course, people who live in the fantasy land of politics, I think, sort of imagine that this is a reasonable, right?
Well, you know, you can't say after you first go and visit the doctor because he could take you 12 weeks to get diagnosed and then you can't get seen the next day and so on.
And of course, you know, they just don't, they don't have the capacity because, you know, politicians in general lack any kind of basic human empathy.
They don't have the capacity to say, OK, well, what are doctors going to do?
Well, doctors are just like the rest of us.
They respond to incentives.
If I am going to be personally liable or someone is going to be personally liable for someone and make sure that they have to see a specialist within 12 weeks of being diagnosed, then all I'm going to do is never diagnose them.
I mean, absolutely not.
I'm going to go under the radar.
I'm going to give them sort of, you know, written on the back of self-destructing pieces of paper diagnoses.
Or, what's more likely, is that if I see somebody who has an ailment that's covered under one of these wait time lists, and I'm not 100% sure, I mean, I think doctors, I mean, they don't want to kill people, so, you know, if I'm not 100% sure, I'm just going to refer him.
So, patience.
who fall into these categories of these waiting time restrictions are just going to get tossed around like hot potatoes until they die.
So, I mean, it's actually far worse than the existing system to have any kind of wait times.
Increased funding, of course, isn't going to do anything because, I mean, you know, giving money to government is just like throwing gasoline on a fire.
I mean, it just makes everything worse.
So funding won't solve anything.
Funding just goes to, you know, junkets to study health care systems in Thailand and bureaucrats and all this sorts of nonsense.
So, I mean, this is just an example, sort of, of what's funny about these kinds of things, that they just make up these wait times.
And, you know, if we are to believe them, then these wait times are possible, and therefore, for the last 30 years, they've just chosen not to do it for some perverse reasons of their own.
Or these wait times are not possible, in which case they're just kind of filthy liars, right?
So, either way, they don't come across too well.
So, of course, the other aspect, as I mentioned before, is this two-tier healthcare system.
And, you know, for those who are not familiar with the ins and outs of our wonderfully Stalin-esque healthcare system, I'll sort of explain the way that it really works.
The way that it really works is that there's sort of A near infinite number of tiers within our healthcare system, but they can be broadly broken into three major categories.
I'm saying we have a three-tier healthcare system up here.
The first is those who know somebody.
I mean, this is incontrovertible, and I know this from personal experience, that if you have somebody you know who is not well, let's say they have cancer of the liver, and you work in the healthcare field already, say you are a psychologist or a psychiatrist and so on, and your father, say, has cancer of the liver, Then you can get a specialist pretty much the same day, maybe the next day, because, you know, you can work your contacts.
It's generally a very good idea to have, you know, three people in your social circle who are experts.
One is the doctor, one is the lawyer, and the other is the computer geek.
Now, I'm the computer geek, so an accountant isn't bad either, but definitely you need a doctor because You never know when you're going to need some real help and you're not going to want to have to sit in the sort of cold waiting room of the general health care system.
You need some inside contacts.
So if you know someone, you're going to be fine.
You're going to bump all of the other schmoes all the way out of the way.
Of course, Other aspects of this category are if you're a public figure.
Recently Brian Mulroney, one of our Prime Ministers, had a heart problem.
He's seen within a day, he gets surgery within a week.
And so on.
Because, you know, it really wouldn't look so good for a Canadian Prime Minister to disguise himself and pretend, say, that he was an elderly Trinidadian woman and try and get through the regular health care system and just see how far he got because, you know, he would sort of expire quietly in some waiting room, probably an emergency.
So, if you are a public figure, you are going to be treated well, because otherwise it would be a pretty bad set of facts for people to deal with about their healthcare system.
This is also the same, as you know, with the drug war.
You know, if they find Art Garfunkel with another joint, they're not throwing him in jail for 20 years because then the brutality of this kind of drug gulag would be a lot more evident to people.
And what they do is they give him, you know, a $50 fine and six hours of community service, right?
So, you know, they make it look like a slap on the wrist, but, you know, if you're some poor black kid, I mean, you're just going up the river without a paddle.
And so, if you're a public figure, obviously, if you're a politician, here the politicians have their own health care system that none of us ordinary mortals are even allowed to gaze on.
So, if you're a politician, if you're a public figure, if you know someone, then you're really pretty much in the clear.
You go to the front of the line, and so on.
It sort of reminds me of these, in the Gulag Apekalago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn talks about how when you had these visiting dignitaries from the West coming over in the 1930s, that the Soviet government would pluck these These poor, shaven-headed convicts from the prison camps, and feed them up, and fatten them, and put them on parade, and see how well we treat even our criminals here, and so on.
And then they shove them right back into the sewer system of the gulag.
I mean, it's the same kind of thing here, right?
These are the kinds of things where George Bernard Shaw can touch down in Moscow or in Russia in the 1930s and come back and say, I have seen the future and it works!
And, you know, so people could then look at the paper and say, wow, you know, this prominent Canadian got health care.
He got his, you know, his heart replaced in, you know, 14 nanoseconds and therefore it must be a great system and so on.
I mean, this is how power sort of spreads, right?
It lies to you about what's actually going on so that you get seduced into thinking that sort of violence and power can work.
And then, you know, by the time it gets embedded into your society, because of your illusions, your belief that it can work, it gets embedded in your society and you can never get rid of it and, you know, you're toast.
So that's sort of the second tier.
The third tier is, you know, you don't have to know someone and you don't have to be a politician.
But if you're rich, you can afford to go to the States for treatment.
I mean, that's really the third option.
You know, I don't believe it's so common for the Americans to come up here for treatment, if memory serves me right, because, you know, our system sucks like a vacuum.
But if you have money, you can go and buy.
You can't buy health care here, but you can buy it in the States.
So, of course, that's your third tier.
And so, of course, there are many layers of this, right?
How famous are you?
How much money do you have?
You know, you're not a politician, but a politician's aide, and so on.
But basically, there is even more complexity in the allocation of our health care resources, in terms of tiers, than there ever would be.
In the private sector system, right?
In a sort of free healthcare system.
In a free healthcare system, there would basically be two tiers.
Well, I guess you could say three, but there's sort of two.
The first is you can afford it, right?
You either, you know, have sucked away your money by not paying for healthcare insurance, or you've paid for healthcare insurance and made sure you've got a very reputable firm.
Then, you know, your stuff is paid for and you're happy and good to go.
The second tier is you can't afford to pay it.
And, you know, nice people subsidize you.
Those nice people could be nice doctors.
You know, I mean, before the introduction of socialized health care, a lot of doctors would give sort of like a half a day a week at least of pro bono work.
I mean, this is very common.
It wasn't like poor people just died in the streets because there was no such thing as human compassion before, you know, the wise mandarins in the capital imposed their vision of health care on us.
So, you know, people are generally nice, if not coerced, so you would get subsidies from hospitals, or subsidies from charities, or subsidies from churches, or subsidies from doctors.
And of course, you know, the third tier would be you just can't afford it at all, right?
And you have no time to wait for charities, like you stagger into an emergency room, an emergency ward, and you're bleeding from, you know, a gunshot wound because you tried to resist your tax collector.
And in which case, I mean, there's just no There's no hospital in any kind of free market that would turn somebody away like that.
I mean, it's just absolutely impossible.
I mean, if you may recall, in 2001, after the attacks in New York, planes were diverted and people had to put people up and, you know, I mean, human beings generally are very nice when they're not coerced and they're very helpful.
And, you know, if you've just made some series of mistakes in your life and you show up in an emergency ward, People are going to treat you.
They're going to be nice.
If you don't believe that human beings have the capacity to respond to another human being suffering with compassion, then you certainly can't advocate a health care system, because people will run the health care system who have that mentality as well.
So it'll just be a basic, huge and horrible power grab.
Well, obviously this is a huge topic and I certainly don't want to exhaust your patience by going, you know, close on an hour.
So, I mean, this is going to be the first of a number of chats which we can have about this issue.
But thank you so much for listening.
I hope that this has been of use to you in helping to understand just how, you know, the effects of violence from an institutional standpoint can be subtle and very destructive and also help you understand why the government, when it wants to expand its power, tends to target particular areas of society, those with very long gaps between, you know, the institutionalization of programs and the destruction that ensues.
So thanks again for listening.
As always, if you have any questions or comments or wish to share any of your experiences, please feel free to visit my blog and email me.
It's freedomain at blogspot.com.
This is Stephen Molyneux.
It is now 9.20 on Sunday night and I'm signing off.
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