John

I keep reading comments on social nit-wit sites like reddit, fark, and digg about how wonderful universal health care is in various member nations of the European Union. These people express outrage over having to pay for the basic “right” of hospital care.

Now, one thing you have to keep in mind is that if health care is a right, then no doctor or nurse may refuse to provide it regardless of the price. To say that the services these people provide are rights that belong to other people is to deny those providers access to the fruits of their labor and indeed, their very labor itself. Essentially, when you state that person A has a right to the labor (medical care in this case) of person B, you are stating that B is a slave to A.

Of course, people who have convinced themselves that they are entitled to a house, a good paying a job, a free education, a free health-care system, and that perfect life promised to them by politicians needing a few more votes have made up all kinds of words and ad hominems to insulate themselves from the necessitiy of thinking.

The current administration says that the total cost of the proposed new health care system will be no more than $1 Trillion over the next ten years. They promise this through magically obtained “cost saving measures” and “increased efficiency”. They must believe that putting medical records on computers will save several trillion dollars if they can add all the obligations they propose to the system and only spend a net $1 trillion.

Even though no government program runs on budget, in order to achieve the results obtained in key EU countries, lets see what we would have to spend. (based on Forbes research of overal tax burdens of several nations)

if the United States increased the taxes it steals from its citizens to the level of these countries, this is how much extra money we’d “have” to throw away on various perceived ills: (see table to the left)