For every problem government tries to solve, it creates two or three more

ObamaCare is wrought with problems. In addition to a failed roll out of the federal exchange computer system, there have been canceled individual policies that Obama is trying to uncancel by fiat as he did by delaying of the employer mandate for a year and issuing assorted waivers to favored unions and companies, all to fix a broken law.

Who could’ve predicted it?

Apparently the late UNLV economics professor Murray Rothbard could. In his 1995 book “Making Economic Sense,” Rothbard wrote:

One of Ludwig von Mises’s keenest insights was on the cumulative tendency of government intervention. The government, in its wisdom, perceives a problem (and Lord knows, there are always problems!). The government then intervenes to “solve” that problem. But lo and behold! instead of solving the initial problem, the intervention creates two or three further problems, which the government feels it must intervene to heal, and so on toward socialism.

No industry provides a more dramatic illustration of this malignant process than medical care. We stand at the seemingly inexorable brink of fully socialized medicine, or what is euphemistically called “national health insurance.” Physician and hospital prices are high and are always rising rapidly, far beyond general inflation. As a result, the medically uninsured can scarcely pay at all, so that those who are not certifiable claimants for charity or Medicaid are bereft. Hence, the call for national health insurance.

Rothbard concludes that the problems with medicine were created by the government, beginning in 1910 with the Flexner Report that recommended all medical schools and hospitals be state licensed. The states essentially put out of business all medical schools that were proprietary and profit-making, especially those that taught disciplines other than allopathic medicine, such as homeopathy. The states closed medical schools that admitted blacks and women. Half of the medical schools in the country were put out of business.

Even before ObamaCare nearly half of all the nation’s health-care spending came from government sources, most of which do not pay what private insurance pays.

Rothbard concludes:

When managers such as trustees take over from owners financed by customers (students of patients), the managers become governed by the perks they can achieve rather than by service of consumers. Hence: a skewing of the entire medical profession away from patient care to toward high-tech, high-capital investment in rare and glamorous diseases, which rebound far more to the prestige of the hospital and its medical staff than it is actually useful for the patient-consumers.

And so, our very real medical crisis has been the product of massive government intervention, state and federal, throughout the century; in particular, an artificial boosting of demand coupled with an artificial restriction of supply. The result has been accelerating high prices and deterioration of patient care. And next, socialized medicine could easily bring us to the vaunted medical status of the Soviet Union: everyone has the right to free medical care, but there is, in effect, no medicine and no care.

Speaking of no care, the British press has been filled with stories of late all aghast at plans by the National Health Service to have patients operated on in India to save money.

Former Labour health secretary Patricia Hewitt told the MailOnline that NHS doctors could be flown to India to treat locals to raise money for cash-strapped UK hospitals, and less expensive Indian doctors could be brought to the UK to perform operations.

The MailOnline reported: “Mrs Hewitt said there was a growing number of areas, including a range of cardiac procedures, where Indian doctors could deliver similar or better clinical outcomes at substantially lower costs than the NHS.”

Heart bypass surgery in India may cost as little as £1,000, compared with £35,000 in the UK. More than 70,000 Britons already fly abroad each year for private surgery, the paper said..

The NHS has a projected £30 billion deficit by 2020.

A glimpse of the future of health care that looks all too familiar

Demonstrators outside the Mid-Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust, during an inquiry into standards of care that resulted in 1,200 patient deaths.

ObamaCare kicks in with a vengeance in 2014. What will American health care look like a few decades hence as a result?

Considering this administration’s long string of cover-ups and lies — from Fast and Furious to Benghazi to secretly snooping on reporters — one might see through an editorial in today’s Financial Times into the future.

The U.K.-based publication clearly embraces that nation’s socialized health care system, saying its upcoming 65th anniversary should be “a day of celebration for what Aneurin Bevan, founder of the NHS (National Health Service), rightly described as the hallmark of a civilised society.”

Instead, Brits are getting a steady stream of reports of neglect, abuse and cover-your-ass cover-ups. “Whistleblowers have been bullied and dissenters intimidated in a misguided attempt to deflect criticism,” the newspaper reports. “Now the disease appears to have spread to the Care Quality Commission, the NHS regulator. This week it was alleged that former management at the CQC tried to suppress criticism of inspections at the University Hospitals of Morecambe Bay, where several babies died.”

Apparently some top health care administrators were under some kind of gag clauses in their contracts and were not allowed to speak out about overcrowding and patient safety. At one hospital, Mid-Staffordshire, up to 1,200 people died as a result of poor care. “But if even the regulator charged with exposing the weaknesses of the system cannot be trusted to be transparent, there is no guarantee that standards will improve,” FT’s editorial suggests.

The conclusion of the editorial had an eery ring of familiarity:

“The NHS is about to embark on one of the most challenging periods of its history. It will have to treat a rapidly ageing population with fewer resources and greater scrutiny of results. Its survival can only be ensured if everyone — healthcare workers and regulator — focus on protecting patients rather than themselves.”

If only someone had chosen to protect our diplomats abroad in hostile territory instead of making up lies to protect themselves from having to take responsibility?

This glimpse of the future of American health care under a monolithic bureaucracy looks way too familiar.