Brian Lee Crowley testified before Pennsylvania legislators this week, on behalf of AIMS and the Galen Institute, to describe the minefield ahead in further politicizing health care. Crowley uses a mix of in-depth research and personal experience to show the faults within Canadian health care and the lessons Americans can draw from its experience. As politicians are drawn into ever more responsibility for health care decisions and outcomes, he says, it creates a dynamic in which the politicians must demand ever more control over the system. Yet at the same time, politicians are never willing to impose the ruinous taxes that would be necessary to fund a system in which people make their own decisions about their health care but governments pick up the tab. Rationing is the inevitable outcome. The experience has been similar in many countries where governments have set up public insurance schemes in competition with private schemes. Almost universally, conditions are created where private insurers cannot make money, or where they form a government-sponsored cartel and essentially cease to compete with one another in any serious way on price or quality. When private providers face circumstances where they can only fail, government becomes de facto the monopoly supplier.
Click here for the full testimony.