Lessons from Europe
A warning about government-run health care from Daniel Hannan, British member of the European Parliament:
If you decide to do this thing, you can’t do it experimentally for a year or two and then change your mind if it doesn’t work out. That isn’t our experience. That isn’t how the dynamic of the thing operates. One point four million people work for the British National Health Service. One point four million people. It is the third largest employer on the planet. The largest is the Chinese Red Army. The second largest is the Indian national railways. The third largest in the British NHS. And here’s the really scary statistic. Of that 1.4 million people, the majority are bureaucrats. There are more managers in that 1.4 million than there are doctors and nurses put together. … When you have that big a block of the electorate who feel that they have a vested interest in the status quo, you try and get any major party to go into an election promising a radical change. … Be absolutely certain before you make this change that you really do want to do it, because if it doesn’t work out, don’t imagine that people are then going to say: “Well, yeah; that’s alright; we’ll just go back to how it was.”
Watch the whole talk for more lessons from
