As most of you know by now, Senator Bernie Sanders from Vermont was rushed to hospital a few days ago and two stents were inserted into his arterial passages in order to unblock the blood flow in his body. The irony of this very high-quality and very high-speed medical care was not lost upon those of us on the Right, given that the unreconstructed Communist who spent his honeymoon in the Soviet Union immediately called for “Medicare for all!” after his operation.

Now, in theory, free medical care for everybody sounds great. I’ve been to countries where free medical care exists. I’ve lived in a couple of them for decent stretches of time.

In reality, however, the results of “free” medical care for everyone are decidedly mixed.

Let’s take a look at the countries where it actually works, for whatever reason. I’ll give you two examples: Singapore and Russia.

I lived in Singapore for roughly 4 years in total, between 2001 and 2014. I received excellent medical treatment in the country at very low prices in terms of primary care, on the occasions when I needed it – I could walk into any clinic, anywhere on the island, and get checked out for digestive issues or respiratory infections or whatever else, within less than an hour, and pay less than US$20 out of pocket.

Can any of you imagine paying that little for top-quality medical care in the US for, essentially, treating a cold? The last time that I went to a doctor in the USA for something similar, I ended up paying at least $100 for the “privilege”.

It is well known that Singapore provides superb medical care for low prices compared with the USA, and it is true that Singapore’s medical system covers everybody on the island. Why does it work?

It works because Singapore gives patients the power to decide the cost and quality of their treatment.

It works because the Singaporean system provides a mix of government-funded systems and private care that covers everyone.

It works because the consumer is directly empowered to see what the cost of treatments and tests is.

And it works because the insurance companies don’t get involved except for genuine catastrophic situations.

A big part of the reason why care in the USA is so bloody expensive is because Americans have gotten so used to this notion that they don’t need to pay for doctor’s visits and basic care. This is a direct result of the interference in the labour market and economy of the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned New Deal of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Back in the 1930s and early 1940s, because of FDR’s extreme meddling in the economy and the colossally stupid decisions to freeze wages and hike taxes to nosebleed levels across all income strata, employers had to use other incentives in order to hire and keep employees. That is where the idea of medical insurance coverage for everything came from, and the industry has only evolved and grown since then.

The reality is that if you need to go to the doctor for a simple treatment that requires no specialist intervention and no real testing, then you ought to pay for that out of pocket. The reality is that you should be on the hook for basic medical treatment and care. And the reality is that you ought to have some money put aside for a rainy day, just in case you need it for an emergency – like medical treatment.

These used to be sensible American principles, about 100 years ago. The fact that Americans do not think this way anymore, should tell you plenty about just how much of the original American nation has disappeared.

So let’s look at another country where everyone is covered and everyone gets treatment, albeit not necessarily of the best quality. That would be Russia.

How do things work over there?

Well, based on my experience of living there for a total of roughly 6 months out of the past year, it is again a combination of public and private coverage. The government funds hospitals and treatment centres from people’s income taxes, which are a flat 20% rate on individuals and matched by a 20% rate on businesses, and from the NDS tax – basically a VAT – on consumption, again at 20%.

I’ve visited a Russian hospital in Moscow a few times (long story, had nothing to do with me directly). It was a government-run hospital, and to be honest I was surprised at how clean and well-lit it was. I’ve had to visit a public hospital in India, for instance, and all I can say of that experience is: DON’T GET SICK IN INDIA. Hell, I’ve had to visit a private hospital in India, and I think the same thing about that.

Anyway, that government-run hospital in Russia was (mostly) clean, efficient, modern, and well-equipped. (And staffed with some very attractive female doctors and nurses, of course – it’s Russia, after all.) Patients were admitted quickly and the staff were – for Russians – relatively friendly. (The proviso is important. If you’ve never met older Russians, they tend to be dour and grumpy in a professional capacity – though they are warm and affectionate in private.)

The patients that I knew of personally were given treatment relatively quickly; one of them needed surgery on a radial fracture in his leg, which was done within a couple of days of the initial diagnosis. He had a metal rod inserted in his leg, got physiotherapy to help in his recovery, and was back on his feet and more or less at 100% within 3 months.

I have not been to any private hospitals in Moscow or anywhere else in Russia, but from my (admittedly rather poor) understanding of things, they are quite expensive for average Russians, yet are right up there with private hospitals pretty much anywhere else, including the USA.

Again, the reason why their system works is simple.

The patients and clients are directly exposed to the costs of their decisions. They are given the power and ability to make decisions for themselves. They have the ability to choose between different providers if they want to. And, of course, in Russia the concept of a doctor making a house call is still a real thing.

I bring up all of this because, when you look at systems around the world that do work, and then compare them with systems that don’t work, you quickly realise why the concept of “Medicare for all” is so profoundly idiotic.

Daniel Greenfield wrote extensively about the reality of socialised medicine in his excellent commentary on Red Bernie’s health problems:

While Bernie’s timetable of getting an angioplasty within a day might not sound that impressive to Americans, in the British NHS system, the median time from assessment to treatment is 55.3 days. Mean times for treatment have been cited as being 80 days. The maximum NHS waiting time is supposed to be 18 weeks and almost 16% of patients in the UK have to wait more than 3 months for an angioplasty.

Canada’s socialist system has angioplasty waiting times of around 11 weeks. And that’s after you get an appointment to see a specialist. The usual approach is to hand patients some aspirin and to praise Canada’s enlightened socialist system for not “rushing” patients into the hospital like the Americans.

You can go to the ER, but waiting times in Canadian ERs are worse than most other countries.

Senator Bernie Sanders has cited Norway as an inspiration for his socialist policies. 13.4% of Norwegians wait three or more months for the procedure that Bernie got just by walking into an “undisclosed” hospital in the United States.

Bernie waited a day in Vegas to get his angioplasty. In Norway, he would have waited 39 days.

In Finland, which Bernie has also cited as an inspiration for his socialist program, he would have waited 22 days. In Sweden, another favorite of American socialists, Bernie would have waited 42 days.

In New York, the average wait time is a day.

Sweden has improved from its infamous wait times of over a year during the eighties when 10% of cardiac patients on the waiting list were dying while on line to get access to its “Medicare-for-All”.

Socialists also love to tout the virtues of Cuban medicine. Good luck getting an angioplasty in Cuba.

And that brings us to the one country in the list that Mr. Greenfield noted above where I have lived, where “free” socialised medicine doesn’t work.

That would be Britain, where I have lived for about 3.5 years in total out of the last 15.

Whenever I got sick with even something as mild as a bad cold or a flu, I would dread going to my university’s local clinic. The wait times were always anywhere from one to three hours, the doctors were always overworked, the clinic itself always had an atmosphere of misery and gloom, and the whole process always made me feel as though I was the disease, not whatever bug was causing me problems.

Back in 2004 or thereabouts, I was struck down with some sort of mysterious form of Irritable Bowel Syndrome, which completely threw my digestive system for a loop. I still have no idea what caused it, although time and experience since then make me suspect that the fact that I was eating a high-carb, low-protein, low-fat diet at the time (because I didn’t know any better, natch), and the fact that I was exercising hard pretty much every single day doing chronic cardio combined with weight machines, probably contributed to some serious gut imbalance issues.

I visited the university clinic several times to get the issue checked out. At one point I was recommended to go lookup a specialist at an NHS hospital. I visited one NHS hospital somewhere nearby the university grounds. To this day, I cannot forget the scene that greeted me when I walked in.

The hospital was grimy, poorly lit, and genuinely nasty-looking. The BBC’s local TV channel was playing an interview on the screen above the waiting room – I recall that Sir Patrick Stewart was the subject of the interview itself. And I remember that the staff at that hospital basically looked at me like I was a turd that had just been flung in off the street.

Didn’t take me long to get out of there, that’s for sure.

And, again, my experience with socialised medicine was very, very mild. I was never really particularly ill. I never experienced chronic medical issues in a country with “universal” healthcare. I never had to deal with the kinds of problems that Sen. Sanders has now.

But if I ever do, I hope and pray that I’m in Russia, and not Canada, when that happens.

The reason why is, again, really simple. Socialised medicine means long waiting times, lousy service, a complete disconnect between the price of the treatments involved and the end-user, and, more often than not, highly traumatic and invasive surgical procedures over much more expensive but far more effective and far less traumatic pharmaceutical treatments.

And furthermore, let’s be very clear about one other thing: virtually every socialised medical system around the world is basically bankrupt at this point.

The NHS is a gigantic drain upon the British public fisc. It has huge problems that keep getting covered up by politicians and bureaucrats, and they keep using the problems to throw yet more money at a system that plainly is not working.

The Spanish and French systems are in dire need of deep reform, and they themselves admit this.

The Scandicucks, who are regularly upheld by the American Left as paragons of health care, have some of the worst waiting times anywhere in Europe – especially in Sweden.

The people who should be emulated are likely the Dutch, actually – and that is because they base their system on private insurance policies that provide universal health coverage. It’s not a single-payer system. And even they have some serious problems.

There is no perfect healthcare system anywhere. Some are better than others. But the worst of all possible systems is assuredly one that removes incentives from the patients and puts them in the hands of the State.

Which, of course, is exactly the kind of system that Red Bernie and the rest of the Left intend to implement when they come to power.