Altruist's Get It

by Dr. S. J. Adams

In my post Nonsacrificial Help To Others: Questions and Answers I wrote, “In a sense, altruists understand egoism more deeply than egoists…Their game is to intellectually tie self-interest to evil, and psychologically replace pleasure with pain.” Leave it to a Canadian politician to prove my point.

The New York Times article I discussed in “The “Benevolence” of Socialized Healthcare ” also examined the crisis of socialized medicine from the perspective of critics and bureaucrats:

“While proponents of private clinics say they will shorten waiting lists and quicken service at public institutions, critics warn that they will drain the public system of doctors and nurses. Canada has a national doctor shortage already, with 1.4 million people in the province of Ontario alone without the services of a family doctor.

“‘If anesthetists go to work in a private clinic,’ Manitoba's health minister, Tim Sale, argued recently, ‘the work that they were doing in the public sector is spread among fewer and fewer people.’”

In other words, the best argument that critics of private clinics have is that the medical staff of public facilities will leave for the private sector(!). This is an argument against privatization? In fact, it is a rare and troubling admission by the Hug Nazis—they know that the system is horribly corrupt and cannot be fixed with more socialism, and that private clinics attract people precisely because of their merits: less bureaucracy, better care, and more earnings for their effort. But socialists don’t care. To people such as this, it’s not about quality service; it’s about power.

And note the strategy they employ. They don’t try to present a case for the current system (as they know they can’t), they instead try to make a case against a new system by means of guilt. It runs along the lines of, “If we have private clinics, then doctors will leave the public system, which means fewer doctors to care for all the patients, which means low quality care, mistakes, longer waits, deaths. Private clinics will mean the deaths of the poor who can’t afford them.”

Of course, this ignores the actual deaths of people in the public system. It also ignores the great likelihood that the patients will leave the system, too, leading to a balancing out of workload across the public and private systems. And this is their great fear: a private market will put the bureaucrats out of business. By which I mean: out of power.