The LA Times informs us that a bill to impose a government-run, single-payer healthcare system in California is proceeding through the state legislature with the relentlessness of an asteroid on collision course with Earth. Not much drama exists over whether the bill will pass or not. Liberal Democrats have huge majorities in both houses of the California state legislature, and Governor Jerry Brown is likely eager to sign such a bill. Not even the fact that a method to pay for such a massive takeover of health care in the most populous state of the union is going to stop things or even appreciably slow things down.
The only drama is how soon and in what manner will health care in California be destroyed.
State lawmakers are visiting Canada, whose government-run health care system is plagued by long wait times for procedures, many far beyond what are medically sensible. These problems are apparently being waived away since California politicians are confident that their socialized medicine system will run much smoother. Thus far, no one has gone to great britain, where the National Health Service oversees hospitals that are cesspools of squalor where patients have to suffer at the hands of unsympathetic, overworked staff. No one dares to pay close attention, at least in public, to how the elderly are denied health care in Great Britain to free scarce resources for younger and more curable.
No one will take any notice of the one nationwide government-run health system in the United States, the Veterans’ Administration system where those who served to protect our freedom are abused, placed on secret waiting lists, and driven to suicide out or despair.
That is the future California can now expect. The wealthy and well connected will still get top of the line healthcare, even if they have to engage in medical tourism to places like Texas.
Everyone else will be pretty much out of luck unless they have the cash and live close to the border of another state where health care will still be available. Everyone else should get ready for long wait times, shortages of procedures and drugs, and premature death and needless suffering. The exodus of the middle class from California, already ravaged by artificially inflated housing costs, will accelerate.
Doctors will head for the exits, not willing to work under what is likely to be madcap state rules and regulations. Businesses will continue to decamp to more friendly environments such as Texas and Florida.
Inevitably the collapse of the system, bankruptcy, and chaos, will ensue. If the scenario seems far-fetched, look at Venezuela, once one of the prosperous countries in South America, now sliding into anarchy. And the good people of California will have done it to themselves,