The Lessons of Walter Reed

If you have been following the news lately, then it is likely that you have heard about the horrors that were perpetrated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Suffice to say, the care provided to injured American soldiers was less than adequate. It is a nightmarish fact that our wounded soldiers were being provided with standards of care that could only be described as ghoulish. Certainly not befitting of heroes returning from fighting the good fight against the Islamic hordes abroad, keeping them at bay, lest we find them on our shores before we can say "Allahu Akhbar" (as the Bush narrative tells it). Walter Reed teaches us a painful lesson, but one that we have been taught many times before. However, no matter how often or how painfully it is beaten into us, the vast majority staunchly refuse to accept it. This is what happens when you let the government handle healthcare.

Looking for the dream of Euro-Canadian public health, provided in government hospitals and paid for on the public dole? Well, here it is! What, not what you were expecting? This is the inevitable result of turning over something as important as the public health to the public sector.

But surely, I doth protest too much, you say. It must be that this had more to do with corrupt officials, with people who deliberately skirted their duties. It was not a systematic error, it is something that we can fix, and then avoid in the future! I agree that heads ought roll over this crime. And with a story of this high publicity, it is thankfully likely that they will. However, I also say that yes, this is systematic! This sort of thing will emerge again, given enough time, regardless of whether it ever gets such large coverage again. Why, you ask? The reason is, no price.

The price mechanism is the one, and the only, method by which data can be transmitted through the market to allow for rational economic calculation. In any instance of a public good, it is impossible to collect data on how best to invest resources, or to know where, when, how, and to what extent to invest. Only through the price mechanism in a free market can consumers effectively tell producers that information, through their decisions to purchase or hold off on certain goods and services. Ludwig von Mises showed in his Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth that, for this reason, having any kind of socialist economy was literally impossible. This does not apply only to full on state-communism, as promulgated by the Soviet Union. It applies to any and all "social programs" of egalitarian wealth redistribution.

Because public healthcare operates without a price mechanism, it operates with no ability to rationally invest resources so as to maximize welfare. For that reason, substandard care will always and everywhere be the rule, and not the exception, of government-controlled healthcare.