The coronavirus has a lot of people worried, but it has also been the crisis the left was desperately waiting for to try to push through their radical agenda. They tried sneaking in funding for abortions, climate change, and illegal aliens in the stimulus package.
Now they have moved on to the rallying cry now that the U.S. would have been impervious to the global pandemic if only we had Medicare for all. This isn’t just wrong, it’s a deadly idea.
The primary reason we were caught off guard by the coronavirus is that the state failed in the first place, and the state failed on multiple fronts through multiple agencies. For instance, the CDC at first refused to let private companies develop tests. Instead, only the CDC was allowed to administer them, and because of that, early testing completely failed. Once President Trump lifted that regulation, the U.S. began testing more people every day than any other two countries.
Private industry bailed out the failed government agency on this one, and keep in mind that the CDC has had their overall funding and resources increased every year for the past five years.
Another state failure has to do with medical supply stockpiles. This isn’t run exclusively by the CDC, but the federal government keeps warehouses of medical supplies for emergencies. Those resources are typically distributed by FEMA. The Obama-Biden administration almost completely drained this stockpile during the H1N1 outbreak in 2009, they never fully restocked it, despite multiple warnings to do so.
Originally, we should have had enough stuff to deal with a pandemic like this. Instead, the previous administrations failed, and we’re short on supply in this crisis. Yet again, private industry is filling that gap with historic speed. Even pillow manufacturers are refitting their manufacturing to make masks and other valuable medical resources.
Here’s the worse truth. In countries with socialized medicine, death rates are far worse than the U.S. That’s primarily because those countries couldn’t handle even minor increases in medical demand brought on by the coronavirus. Italy was overburdened with only 1,000 cases of coronavirus. They now have over 100,000 people infected and their healthcare system has totally collapsed. Their death rate is almost much higher than the rest of the world. While the U.S’s death rate is hovering around 3%, Italy has an almost 10% death rate. Yet, they’re in the middle of the pack in terms of socialized medicine in Europe.
Spain, Sweden, The Netherlands and France all have single-payer systems, and they’re all doing a whole lot worse than the U.S. Even Sweden, the darling of the left, has a higher death rate than the U.S. does. Socialized medicine is failing left and right.
In the interest of fairness, we should mention the two single-payer systems that are competing with the U.S. in terms of death rates, but they’re both depending on geographical advantages. Those countries are Canada and Australia.
Canada’s numbers are comparable to the U.S., but Canada has the lowest population density of any country on earth. Australia is completely surrounded by water, and they were able to dramatically slow the rate at which the virus entered their country. So far, they’re one of the best places, statistically, but we’ll see if that lasts.
The bottom line is simple. Socialized medicine is failing all over the world, and those systems are killing tens of thousands of people because they can’t respond to the emergency.
The U.S. absolutely could have done better with the benefit of hindsight. It turns out that when we got the government out of the way and let capitalism do its things, the biggest problems were solved immediately. There’s no question which way is the right way, and when the U.S. is exporting supplies and experts to the rest of the globe to help them recover, you’ll know which way that is.
