REAGAN ON SOCIALIZED MEDICINE

Most posts on this blog concentrate on the details of how badly socialized medicine works in practice. There is however a case to be made against socialized medicine IN PRINCIPLE -- and the audio clip below is a reproduction of a speech made by Ronald Reagan many years ago which covers just that.

Double click on the image below to hear a great speech from a great man:

(Via STACLU)





An Australian State government deliberately slack on doctor standards

The New South Wales Government has been accused of being slow to act on a plan to tighten national scrutiny of foreign doctors. The Australian Doctors Trained Overseas Association says it has developed a national agreement, including a set of standards, to assess the clinical abilities of all foreign doctors. But the association says that the other states are unwilling to sign off on the new agreement, because NSW Health is dragging its feet.

The association's president, Andrew Schwartz, says he believes that NSW does not want to join the agreement because it will interfere with its ability to recruit doctors. "The NSW public health system recruits most of its doctors from overseas and rates them as occupational trainees and they are actually not not doing any trainee work," he said. "They are just doing ordinary service work." "Because of the wording of what they are called, they avoid that assessment process that everybody else has to go through by the NSW Medical Board."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL hospitals and health insurance schemes should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the very poor and minimal regulation. Both Australia and Sweden have large private sector health systems with government reimbursement for privately-provided services so can a purely private system with some level of government reimbursement or insurance for the poor be so hard to do?

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