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Universal coverage or cutting costs

Choose one or the other, because you can't have both:

Universal health care has a basic and fatal flaw, you can’t simultaneously reduce the cost of a service and increase access to it. If you have universal access, you have to find a way of paying for people to get that access, which raises costs. If you want to keep costs down you can only economize so far before you have to restrict access. Universal health care is a bit like a perpetual motion machine—it would be wonderful in theory, but it can’t actually exist in reality.

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Comments (1)

Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 02/01/2008 - 11:18am.

Idiotic and trivially wrong; it's sufficient to observe that every industrial nation but the United States spends far less per capita on health care, has equivalent or shorter waiting times for care, and still manages to cover almost every individual.

The truth is that our current system introduces such a great level of inefficiency that we could easily achieve universal coverage for less than we spend now.

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