Sally Pipes On The Problems And Costs Of Single Payer Health Care Systems

See California’s ‘Free’ Health Care Won’t Come Cheap: The state may implement a single-payer system—meaning substandard care, wait lists and new taxes in the WSJ. She is president and CEO of the Pacific Research Institute. Excerpt:

"Yet the financial costs of single-payer are practically negligible compared with the human costs. Consider the Department of Veterans Affairs’ scandal-plagued single-payer health program. Last month, the agency’s inspector general found that more than 100 veterans died while waiting for care at a Los Angeles VA facility between October 2014 and August 2015.

Hospitals in the United Kingdom’s single-payer system, the National Health Service, are so overcrowded that the British Red Cross earlier this year labeled the situation a “humanitarian crisis.” In my native Canada, patients face a median wait time of 20 weeks from seeing a primary-care doctor to getting treatment from a specialist, according to a November 2016 report from the Fraser Institute, a Canadian think tank. These delays have more than doubled since 1993. Is it any wonder that around 45,000 Canadians left the country in 2015 to seek medical treatment?"