Lessons from the coronavirus pandemic

万得福

Lessons from the coronavirus pandemic                  

            The horror of Italy's experience shows that universal health care isn't the answer

By Tammy Bruce                      - -                                                                      Wednesday, March 18, 2020

To say the last few weeks have been surreal would be an  understatement. In January, the Democratic Party was having hearings in  the House of Representatives on the impeachment of President Trump. That  same month, as the bureaucratic establishment was wasting our time with  dumb partisan politics, a deadly virus from China had been unleashed on  the world.

In the weeks that followed, there were a series of good, bad and ugly  experiences that will forever be part of the lore in this time of  pandemic. Here are a few observations that deserve attention now as our  nation and the world face the still mysterious “invisible enemy,” as Mr.  Trump recently described the Wuhan virus.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            

If there is a clear lesson so far, the coronavirus pandemic made it  deadly obvious that the last thing humanity needs is so-called universal  health care. Italy has laid bare the horror during a crisis that  socialized medicine unleashes on a nation, making it imperative that  handing over health care to a government is the last thing anyone should  ever allow.

Italy has been suffering through the pandemic with 27,980 cases and  2,158 deaths (as of this writing). Widely recognized as a main  contributor to this is the fact that the Italian “free” health care  system was structurally unable to handle the crisis. According to the  libertarian Mises Institute, Italy “is overwhelmed by the tens of  thousands of COVID-19 cases it is already facing. They have turned to  rationing care to prioritize the young leaving those most at risk to the  virus to essentially fend for themselves. …”

                                                                                                                                                        

It is a “situation made far worse by a reliance on government  centralized healthcare that manages costs by de facto price rationing  rather than a free market system.” Moreover, the report noted that Italy  was experiencing an ongoing health worker shortage before the pandemic  hit, and the number of hospitals has been on a steady decline over the  last couple of decades.

Here in the United States the painfully slow testing procedure made  it clear that our bureaucratic government establishment was incapable of  the simplest of actions — getting tests to the public and having them  analyzed within a reasonable amount of time. The glut of regulations  endemic to a massive bureaucracy made it impossible to get the job done  with the urgency it required.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      

Mr. Trump acted and reversed an onerous FDA rule and streamlined the  process, while creating public/private testing partnerships which  finally ended the bureaucratic debacle. As a businessman, he was more  committed to getting the job done than massaging the  bloated establishment. Italy’s ongoing tragedy alone should serve as the  undeniable warning against so-called universal or nationalized health  care.