Socialized Health Care and the Anti-Capitalistic Mentality: International Evidence

0:00All right, so I will talk about socialized health care and anti-capitalist mentality, international evidence. And the most important is that I think that the enemies of private enterprise, enemies of capitalism, they believe that we need to have a health care reform because health care expenses are going pretty fast up. that today we're spending about 16% of our gross domestic product on health care, on health care. Well, I would say that just everything is in my article, in my report, so you can consult with details over there and it's on the website. But what I want to say is that it's 16% a lot. I mean, health care is pretty important for people.

0:53and it's definitely something which is called normal good. That means when your income are going up, then you demand more of it, more of it, not less of it. I just looked, for example, at the Russian statistics because I will do some data from Russia. And in Russia, they spend 12% on booze. I mean, is that kind of, should we save on healthcare a little bit and do that? So I would say that it's difficult to say whether it's a whether it's too much or not because because if you will look why this is happening in most cases I was I would I would argue that it's because of quality changes and the technological advances how much would you spend on hip replacement or bypass surgery in 1950 not much so there was no such thing at that time and so today we're spending so much I think because we want to live of Money, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money and State, The Theory of Money

2:22There is no other way to save, either by squeezing providers or denying care. There is no other way to save. I mean, how else can you save? There is no such a thing. And so, we can see that we are spending more because we are the richest ones. Then we have these people who are trying to drag us into medical socialism. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was signed into law by Barack Obama on March 23, 2010, and there is a writer also, Healthcare and Education Reconciliation Act, a writer to that law, which effectively nationalized and completely kind of without any public transparency, completely nationalized students' loan industry on the way to nationalization of of Healthcare. Healthcare industry, if you will take, also if you will put together industry of medical devices and pharmaceutical industry, it's 24% of our gross domestic product. So it's one-fourth of our economy can be nationalized just like that.

3:33and President Obama I think knows what he's doing because he openly admits that he said I think there can be some legitimate concerns on the part of private insurers that if any public plan is simply being subsidized by taxpayers endlessly that over time they can compete with the government just printing money he is admitting that pretty, pretty openly, yes and I think that this attack on individual liberty on Private Economy, because what is socialism? Socialism is public ownership. Public ownership is no such thing as public, so it's government ownership on the means of production, so-called. So the government ownership of capital assets. So the minister, I would say outrageous, is that we have, even today you can see that why we're paying a lot, also because government Government is paying already almost half, almost half of all health care expenses.

4:32So we have all the time this notion that kind of something wrong with our health care because free market kind of screwed up our health care and so we need government to recover our health care. Well, we can see that government already is the major purchaser of health care. And definitely, why would they save much if that's government money? The recollect was, I think, Lady Thatcher, she used to say, speak about bureaucrats in England, she said, why should we have one when we can have ten for five times the price?

5:17And so that's exactly, exactly kind of government accounting applicable to health care. All the ideas of healthcare socialists were, at first, I think it was Richard Virchow, the guy who prepared Otto von Bismarck, he prepared all the theories for Otto von Bismarck to impose the first welfare state in Germany at the end of the 19th century. And so his point was medicine is social science and politics, nothing but medicine on a grand scale, on a grand scale. So you can see that some people would say, well, with global warming, that's enough already to Justify Socialism, what Dr. Virchow was saying, that medicine is just enough to take over our lives, that that can be one single industry from which socialism would spread everywhere else.

6:06Then in the United States, for me it's very sad to see how brainwashing of people is going on at the expense of brainwashed and not brainwashers. So if you will look at national public radio, PBS, movies like Seco, and especially NPR and PBS, they use taxpayers' money to lobby for more taxpayers' money, to lobby for more socialism and especially kind of disgusting I would say is Michael Moore because he knows I know what he's doing and what if we'll go to Cuba at first. He's writing about Cuba, his movie is sicko, I think that maybe some of you watched it.

6:56It's an interesting movie. I know that it's kind of, it's better to get really drunk to watch it. Yeah, otherwise it would be detrimental to your health. This is, I've traveled to Cuba several times And yesterday, actually, I was discussed with Lew Rockwell, the idea of maybe having a von Mises Institute trip to Cuba, that would be very interesting, it would be like to go into the socialist zoo, that's the Jurassic Park of Socialism. So, this is... I'm thinking that, yes, I promised Lew that I will prepare some kind of a flyer for that event.

7:42This is Cuba. This is a store in Cuba. You can see that at the Workers Paradise, they have plenty of goods. This... I was asking, what is this in this box? This is the only good you can buy without a rationing coupon. and that's baking soda, even talking to a Cuban official I said that people who are in charge of baking soda should be in charge of the national economy and this is a Cuban kind of real estate, you can see it's a lot of fixer-uppers there That's a beautiful, proud people, completely destroyed, completely reduced to the life of Gulag prisoners. The whole island is like this, everything is deteriorating, falling apart.

8:33This is healthcare in Cuba, this is ambulance, this is Cuban ambulance, because I had some Some of my students watched Michael Moore's masterpiece and so they had some questions. And I have a friend from Cuba. He was brainwashed in Moscow. You know that Cuba was kind of a Soviet possession in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. And so he went to Moscow State University. And when I would go to Cuba with my students, I would, and when we would go, we had a meeting with him. And he would pass around his coupons, books, rationing books, and everything to show how... He, however, is kind of self-defensive, because, I mean, you cannot say suicidally that everything is bad.

9:20So he would say... And one young woman from my class, she said, well, we see it's a disaster completely, so many problems you have, but we heard that you have the best health care in the world. He said, sure, we do. We have the best health care in the world, but it would be even better if we would have This is just for the balance. I went with my students in January to Miami. And in Miami, we met some doctors who made these pictures from Cuba. This is not raisins. These are flies. You can see all around. This is a Cuban hospital, Cuban hospital.

10:05more pictures of Cuba, I can email you of Cuban hospitals so if we will go to Russia, Russia had the longest history of socialist medicine it was introduced in 1918 already, completely free and sure enough, look what happened after 75 years of socialist economizing in Russia, the population is declining, 36% of hospitals in Russia do not have running water sewer system.

10:51That's the superpower which was sending people to space, which had 28,000 nuclear warheads. I can imagine you have a surgery and then you need to go to the outhouse and the nurse First we'll go to the well and pick up a bucket of water there and boil it to wash the equipment and stuff like that. It's a complete disaster, complete disaster. What however is interesting for us is that now what they're doing, they are privatizing in a fast forward way, they are privatizing their health care. And I'm just trying to find there a quote, a quote from one member of Russian Duma, Russian Parliament, who is just essentially saying that it's amazing, yes, member of Russian Duma, Oleg Kulikov, his name is, he made a statement, it's fascinating, we are returning to capitalism and healthcare by increasing the share of private payments and healthcare Revisions, while Obama suggested the system, which we rightly can define as a communist or socialist system, they're assuming positions that we are so happily abandoned.

12:05And that's exactly what it is. Yes. If you will think that it's only kind of a barbarous Russia or backward Cuba, no. Look at all this wonderful social democracies of the Western Europe. Look at Sweden. in Sweden is right now busy privatizing their health care. David Cameron, British Prime Minister, just in the beginning of this year, his point is that the National Health Service in the United Kingdom is right now branching out and contracting out a lot of its service to private providers. And he made a point that in the long run we should privatize the whole industry. That's David Cameron. In Sweden, they have a pretty right-wing in Government. I mean, there's some strange kind of, in the United States, many people believe that Sweden is such a wonderful socialist paradise. It is not. It is, right now, I think it's more free from point of view of economics than the United States. And they are privatizing, and they privatized a lot of things already. And I remember when, that's the only funny

13:16Anything I heard from Mr. Gorbachev, I was one of economic advisors. I wouldn't take the blame for what happened over there. Something too big to fail failed. But the chief economic advisor was a bell-a-gun began, the biggest economist in the world. He was even bigger than me. He was maybe 400 pounds at least. And he all the time like a parrot would say, What we need in the socialist economist, we need to follow Swedish model. And he was repeating it on and on and on and even Gorbachev, he exploded, he said, Abel, where we would get all these Swedes? And that was the only kind of funny thing I heard from him.

14:06But that's definitely that it's a dead end. It's a complete mess, socialized health care. Back when I joined the economic reforms crowd in Moscow, the Gorbachev's Reform Team, I was put in for a medical checkup into the party hospital just to see kind of an inventory they have there. What did they get health-wise? What kind of slave you have, intellectual slave, what kind of my features are. And so I spent a week there, and they're taking tests and doing x-rays, and I'm thinking, why in the world are they keeping me for so long just for tests? And I had a wonderful doctor, nice, very nice, I'm not a look-sist, but she looked very nice, and so I invited her for a dinner, and she misunderstood me, well at that time I was 25 years younger and didn't have this capitalist accumulations on me, so we went for a dinner, And at the dinner, my hidden agenda was to find out what's wrong with me, why they're

15:14keeping me in the hospital. And I asked her, and she said, come on, you should be happy that you're in the hospital, that means that everything is fine with you. I said, please explain. She said, well, look, I mean, you know you're an economist, it's planning, planning. Our major indicator of success is mortality rate. So the plan is that the hospital is good, considered to be good, if they have low mortality Rate, and if you need to have a low mortality rate, then you need to get rid of anybody who can die, and then the point was exactly that, if you would have any signs of this imminent death, then we would throw you out too, and so it is, I think we have enough of, in the United States, already enough of socialists, we have more than enough of socialists, We have unified school districts. Can you imagine if we would have these medical boards exactly like that, deciding who will die, who will not, and that never worked, and I'm thinking that it's just so obvious, and hopefully we'll get rid of that.

16:24However, Hans-Hermann Hoppe, and it's all in my paper, he presented a wonderful plan, what should be done, how we should cut on barriers erected by the government on the healthcare market, how we should open this market, how competition should reign there, and it would provide us with everything else, because mainstream economics also in the paper, by Kenneth Arrow or Paul Krugman or the likes, they're making the point that healthcare is not like bread. Yes, it's not like bread, definitely, I mean, but they don't say anything else. They're saying that it shouldn't be sold and bought because it's not bread.