>Resources are not, in fact, limited. Not in the U.S. and not in Canada.
Universal health care
>systems must make allocation decisions - but those decisions are only
tough if government
>funding is not adequate to begin with.
I disagree strongly. Resources ARE limited. Try giving universal health care at middle class US standards to the entire world. There aren't enough qualified doctors, let alone enough medical supplies. We've reached the point where we should be able to feed the world's population, but we can't give everyone a US middle class lifestyle.
And maintaining that lifestyle in the US exploits people in the rest of the world to begin with. On a global scale (which I think is the appropriate frame of reference) per capita income is very unimpressive, making efficient use of resources a worthy goal.
>What's at work here - and at stake here - is the right wing propraganda
that economies, budgets,
>money etcetera behave according to some kind of immutable law and
therefore things are the
>way they are just because that's the way things are, when in reality
budgets, economies
>etcetera are tools devised by humans: to govern the flow of trade, goods,
or labour, or to
>ensure equity of qual;ity of life, or minimum living standards, or
whatever, but they are products
>of a process of prioritization. Therefore, they are subject to change by
society. change the
>priorities from ensuring "efficiency" in the cost-benefit or
cost-effectiveness sense to ensuring
>that everyone gets thehealth care they need, when they need it. The
economy will conform.
You can change societies priorities so that health care becomes a universal right (either through a single payer system or some other), and that everyone gets access to a doctor when they need it. But you would STILL be concerned with how many resources you would have to supply to the health care system in order to meet this goal. The less costly the better. Your argument says nothing about efficiency per se, only that we should change our priorities of where we put the resources we do have. And on that point I agree with you.
The crux of the issue is not whether or not we should use resources efficiently (in the common sense use of the word), because we should. The crux of the issue is that our resources are being allocated in a grossly unfair way, and it just so happens that the people doing the misallocating are using "efficiency" as a justification.
So our job should be to expose this deception. If you think about it, it should be easy to use their own argument against them. In any fair minded review of the US budget, we should be saying that it is INEFFICIENT to spend so much on military hardware, and relatively so little on health care. It is INEFFICIENT to spend so much on prisons, and so little on programs like WIC and welfare and school lunch programs. This is the real irony of this discussion.
Of course it depends on what you want. If you want the haves to get more, then the current system is pretty efficient and could be improved upon by cutting entitlements and privatizing social security, etc. But if you value social justice, things are very inefficient indeed.
Brett