Free health care is not free

The Illinois legislature just voted unanimously against Government Blagojevich's proposed health care plan that would have been paid for with a gross receipts tax on businesses. Blagojevich found out that soaking business to pay for free health care wasn't as smart an idea as he thought. Politicians, even liberal ones, realized that such taxes might just have succeeded in driving businesses out of Illinois or simply out of business. The Wall Street Journal writes that there might be lessons for other politicians from Blagojevich's debacle.

One lesson here is that it is far easier to talk about "progressive" political causes than to pay for them without doing larger economic harm. In today's global economy, the margin for policy mistakes is smaller, even for individual states. Mr. Daley may appreciate this better than Mr. Blagojevich because he knows the consequences of bad policy will harm Chicago long after the Governor retires to private equity, or some other "fat cat" job.

As for national Democrats, Presidential candidate John Edwards has already proposed a huge tax increase to pay for national health care. At least he's honest about what such promises require, but we doubt it will help his Presidential prospects. Illinois Senator Barack Obama has been silent on his Governor's tax implosion, but someone should get him on the record. And Hillary Clinton, well, we can't wait to see how "universal" her promises will be.

This would have been the largest state tax increase as a share of state revenues in a decade. This is on top of Blagojevich's new spending and taxes from his first term.

While politicians are busy trying to have the government take care of more and more health care, perhaps they might learn from the newest study comparing cancer survival rates among European countries and the U.S. The difference in survival rates means that people are dying for lack of access to new drugs.

The researchers studied Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, South Africa and the US, as well as 19 European countries, with a total population of 984 million, and looked at access to 67 newer cancer drugs.

They found that the proportions of female cancer patients surviving five years beyond diagnosis in France, Spain, Germany, Italy were 71 per cent, 64 per cent, 63 per cent and 63 per cent respectively. In the UK it was 53 per cent.

Among men the proportions still alive at five years in the same countries were 53 per cent, 50 per cent, 53 per cent and 48 per cent. Again in the UK it was lower at 43 per cent.

They found that British patients, despite their socialized health care, in case after case are more likely to die because of lack of access to new drugs.

Dr Nils Wilking, a clinical oncologist at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, said: "Our report highlights that in many countries new drugs are not reaching patients quickly enough and that this is having an adverse impact on patient survival. Where you live can determine whether you receive the best available treatment or not.

"To some extent this is determined by economic factors, but much of the variation between countries remains unexplained. In the US we have found that the survival of cancer patients is significantly related to the introduction of new oncology drugs."

The researchers, whose report is published in the journal Annals of Oncology, found that Austria, France, Switzerland and the US were leaders in using new cancer drugs.

The greatest differences in the uptake of drugs were noted for the new colorectal and lung cancer drugs.

The proportion of colorectal cancer patients with access to the drug Avastin was 10 times higher in the US than it was in Europe, with the UK having a lower uptake than the European average.

As politicians in the United States propose methods to go closer and closer to a nationalized health plan and to interfere in the free market of pharmaceutical research, they might pay attention to such studies that show how our market-based drug industry is developing new treatments and doing better at getting those drugs to the people that need them than those socialized plans in Europe. They want to kill the goose that lays golden eggs, but in this case, those eggs save lives.

(link via Captain's Quarters)